"I am, by definition, not interesting because I have no advertisable dysfunction." -Rick Marin Newsweek February 10, 2003 p. 12

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public." - H.L. Mencken

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being…. When the State encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accomodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe. - Zorach v Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 312-314 (1952).

"The wise Greeks believed genuine happiness (true success and fulfillment) resided not in the feelings at all, nor in our accumulations, but rather in the soul. In fact, their word for happiness, was eudaimonia, 'having a good soul'." - Reverend William J. O'Malley, S.J. America, May 9, 1998, pp.10-11

"Happiness, then, independent of feelings, means being serene in the face of the unchangeable, courageous before the changeable and wise enough to know which is which - being 'at home' within oneself and within the web of human relationships, however disconcerting." - Reverend William J. O'Malley, S.J. America, May 9, 1998, pp.10-11

"For every time a man withstands temptation / It is a partial cause of his salvation." - The Canturbury Tales "The Friar's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer

"Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a pool." - Mike

"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored and sorrows end." - Sonnet 30

"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds," - Sonnet 116

"If" By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired buy waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t' give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dream your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts you aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton

The will of God or the lunacy of man—it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively, the will of many and the lunacy of God. It must be satisfying to be quite certain which way to look at it.

Conway was the antithesis of such a type; he was inclined to see vulgarity in the Western ideal of superlatives, and "the utmost for the highest" seemed to him a less reasonable and perhaps more commonplace proposition than "the much for the high." He did not, in fact, care for excessive striving, and he was bored by mere exploits.

"You’re too confoundedly philosophic for me. That wasn’t your mood during the trouble at Baskul." "Of course not, because then there was a chance that I could alter events by my own actions. But now, for the moment at least, there’s no such chance. We’re here because we’re here if you want a reason. I’ve usually found it a soothing one."

"If I could put it into a very few words, dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself."

Conway had grown used to people liking him because they misunderstood him.

Yet to Conway it did not appear that Eastern races were abnormally dilatory, but rather that Englishmen and Americans charged about the world in a continual and rather preposterous state of feverheat.

His liking for Chinese art was an affair of the mind; in a world of increasing noise and hugeness, he turned in private to gentle, precise, and miniature things.

"They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom." "But that isn’t doing anything." "Then, madam, they do nothing."

"The jewel has facets," said the Chinese, "and it is possible that many religions are moderately true…. But we are only moderately certain."

"Yet you don’t have any democratic machinery—voting, and so on?" "Oh, no. Our people would be completely shocked by having to declare that one policy was completely right and another completely wrong."

"Well, it wasn’t safe. It couldn’t be. There isn’t safety anywhere, and those who thought there was were like a lot of saps trying to hide under an umbrella in a typhoon."

"Your very doubt pleases me—it is the basis of profound and significant faith…"

The first quarter-century of your life was doubtless lived under the cloud of being too young for things, while the last quarter-century would normally be shadowed by the still darker cloud of being too old for them; and between those two clouds, what small and narrow sunlight illuminates a human lifetime!

"Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue."

People who hero-worship must be prepared for disillusionments.

"I was excited and suicidal and scared and reckless and sometimes in a tearing rage—like a few million others, in fact. I got mad-drunk and killed and lechered in great style. It was the self-abuse of all one’s emotions, and one came through it, if one did at all, with a sense of almighty boredom and fretfulness."

"The exhaustion of the passions is the beginning of wisdom."

For years his passions had been like a nerve that the world jarred on; now at last the aching was soothed, and he could yield himself to love that was neither a torment nor a bore.

"When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive."

People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.

1984 by George Orwell

He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth, it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word…. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like that quacking of a duck.

He took up his pen again and wrote: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

He wondered as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun…. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed…. But precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago…. The end was contained in the beginning.

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account.

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent.

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why. Chapter 1, like Chapter 3, had not actually told him anything that he did not know; it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy.

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"… "Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you b e sure that he is obeying you will and not his own?" Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sec instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no employment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. Buy always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy

I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards.

I wouldn't give them a drink of piss if they were dyin' of thirst.

She was a poetess of profanity, an oracle of epithets who could outcuss a bathroom wall.

I have a voice that sounds like a flushing commode, and it is only under optimum circumstances that I allow myself to be pilloried by the world for my lousy voice.

We wanted to do so much, wanted to be small catalysts in the transformation of the disfigured sacramental body of the South, which had sired us. I was a cynic who needed desperately to believe in the salvation of mankind or at least in the potential salvation.

We could not be wrong, because we were young, humanistic, and full of shit.

…Henry Piedmont, child of poverty, man of paramount success, a golfing buddy of Jesus…

They were mostly a lot of calories under gray suits…

To survive in the future I would have to learn the complex art of ass-kissing, that honorably American custom that makes the world go round.

On Writing the College Application Essay by Harry Bauld

Inferior BS is a very shoddy product. But I want to defend BS, so often hooted at by seniors, because when BS reaches a certain (very high) level, it is called thinking, and when it finds a voice, it is called literature. The college essay demands a good dose of medium-high-level BS, and I urge you to cultivate a superior strain of it as soon as your can and with as much care as you can muster.