fat city's big book of quotes

"It's a lowdown world
the poets say
hallelujah, anyway."

-- Kenneth Patchen (Warren, Ohio)

"What forbids us to tell the truth, laughingly?"--Horace, Satires, I.24

"nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807

". . .the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man's equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. When the longest- and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present..." Marcus Aurelius

"God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the .past." Ambrose Bierce

"In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now -- a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed. If we fail to respond today, Saddam, and all those who would follow in his footsteps, will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity, even in the face of a clear message from the United Nations Security Council, and clear evidence of a weapons of mass destruction program." (Bill Clinton, Remarks At The Pentagon, 2/17/98)

",To look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan," wrote Raymond Moley, FDR's right hand man during much of the New Deal, "was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator."

"Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society." -John Adams

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." —John F. Kennedy

"If you think that Uncle Sam feeds you while Big Business is trying to milk you dry, you're a Democrat. If you think that God feeds you, with a little help from a job through Big Business, while Uncle Sam is milking you dry, you're a Republican." —Jay Homnick

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"-- Thomas Jefferson

"An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." —Joseph Pulitzer

"The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral."; -- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 11, 1787)

"There are only three things that continue: Life-Death & the lumberjacks are coming"- The Bard

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"Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few." -- John Adams (An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 29 August 1763)

"Some dreams don't die easily. Others don't die at all." Lyn Nofziger

"I think the so-called conservative is today what was, in the classic sense, the liberal. The classical liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the conservative." --Ronald Reagan

The poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. Theodore Dalrymple

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." -- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

"Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work." —H.L. Mencken

"We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all maters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it." -- George Washington (letter to James Madison, 30 November 1785)

"Journalists are sloppy and lazy."-- Paul Nickels