Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

If there has to be a choice between injustice and disorder, said Goethe, the German prefers injustice.

i've been struggling to not quote this source for some time as it will make an appearance in my year-end "favorite things" list/rant; however this line was particularly good regardless of its missing 1900s european context.

In early May Washington wrote to his mother from the frontier town of Winchester. Probably because she had so hotly opposed his taking the post, he stressed his pleasure in serving on Braddock's staff: "I am very happy in the general's family, being trated with a complaisant freedom which is quite agreeable to me, and have no reason to doubt the satisfaction I hope for in making the campaign." Washington ended his formal note with the words, "I am Honored Madam Your most Dutiful and Obedient Son."

Mary Ball Washington [George Washington's mom]...replied to George's letter by asking him to retain a Dutch servant for her and buy her some butter.

even after becoming general and president, george washington's mom did not approve.

When justice does not succeed in being a form of memory, memory alone can be a form of justice.

I gave my love a chain of gold 
 Around her neck to bind;
She keeps me in a faster hold, 
 And captivates my mind.

Methinks that mine's the harder part: 
 Whilst, 'neath her lovely chin, 
She carries links outside her heart, 
 My fetters are within.

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

...

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

...

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

don't become a cynic and don't fall into disdain for "the other."

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

and because hemingway was a smartass...

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Scott Fitzgerald, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott Fitzgerald. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

f. scott fitzgerald complained to the publisher and subsequent versions of the hemignway story replaced "Scott Fitzgerald" with "Julian".

You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa,
If you just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
Where you've never been before?
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?

She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

There will be no war, it will all be arranged. I will drink all the blood shed in the war.

620,000 soldiers died in the resulting Civil War, which was more than the combined US deaths of both World Wars, Vietnam and Korea.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?"

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?”

"What kind of mother would I be if I let you run around looking like a goth? I mean, that kind of lifestyle might fly in Europe, but it's not going to get you very far here in Rosewood."

"Not everyone dreams of making it in Rosewood, Mom. Some people dream of making it out."

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.

". . . I must not allow myself to dwell on the personal - there is no room for it here. Also it is demoralising. But I do not want to die. Not that I mind it for myself. If it be that I am to go, I am ready. But the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turns my bowels to water. I cannot think of it with even the semblance of equanimity.

My one consolation is the happiness that has been ours. Also my conscience is clear that I have always tried to make life a joy for you. I know at least that if I go you will not want. That is something. But it is the thought that we may be cut off from each other which is so terrible and that our Babe may grow up without my knowing her and without her knowing me. It is difficult to face. And I know your life without me would be a dull blank. Yet you must never let it become wholly so. For to you will be left the greatest charge in all the world; the upbringing of our baby. God bless that child, she is the hope of life to me. My darling, au revoir. It may well be that you will only have to read these lines as ones of passing interest. On the other hand, they may well be my last message to you. If they are, know through all your life that I loved you and baby with all my heart and soul, that you two sweet things were just all the world to me.

I pray God I may do my duty, for I know, whatever that may entail, you would not have it otherwise."

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got: a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

The response is attributed to BENJAMIN FRANKLIN— at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation—in the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention.

"You just want me to become a beautiful memory, the sooner the better!"

"Who said anything about beautiful?"

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

You were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

"Oh, and do you remember.” —she added "a conversation we had once about driving a car?"

"Why not exactly."

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

She didn’t answer.

Angry, and in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

...

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again.

...

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die

Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rolling stone
But, that's not how it used to be...

When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me

today, that jester won the nobel prize for literature. well deserved.

here are my thoughts on his work from a previous post a year ago.

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.

if the above quote makes very little grammatical sense, h.l. mencken would agree with you.

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash

he also wasn't a fan of his supporters.

More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly able to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.

Such imbeciles do not want ideas—that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention. What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures. As I say, they can’t understand many words of more than two syllables, but that is not saying that they do not esteem such words. On the contrary, they like them and demand them. The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them. They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery. Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust. If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied. If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning. If a word slips off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and wait for the next.

A monk asked Kegon, "How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?"

Kegon replied, "A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches."

my favorite West Wing scene