Dave Horsey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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A guy from Seattle tries to tell the rest of the country how to shape up and do things right
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy for those who think.
--Horace Walpole
--Horace Walpole
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
--Oscar Wilde
--Oscar Wilde
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
--Benjamin Britten
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes
--Oliver Wendell Holmes
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
--Gandhi
--Gandhi
Language is a cracked kettle drum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
—Flaubert
—Flaubert
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
--Shakespeare
Henry VI, Part 2
--Shakespeare
Henry VI, Part 2
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
―Benjamin Sáenz
―Benjamin Sáenz
Be patient and strong; someday this pain will be useful to you.
--Ovid
--Ovid
I am the Chosen One.
--Donald Trump
The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.
--Dostoevsky
--Dostoevsky
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-- H.L. Mencken
-- H.L. Mencken
The purpose of the president of the galaxy is not to exercise power, it is to distract attention from the people who are really exercising power.
--Doug Adams, Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy
--Doug Adams, Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy
The century has given birth to a great epoch, but the great moment finds a petty generation.
--Goethe
--Goethe
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation – now go and study.
--Hillel the Elder
--Hillel the Elder
Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.
--F.W.Nietzsche
--F.W.Nietzsche
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
--James Joyce
--James Joyce
Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
--Gandalf the Grey (J.R.R. Tolkien)
--Gandalf the Grey (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence.
--Paul Theroux
--Paul Theroux
My Adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just.
--Paul Fussell
--Paul Fussell
A fanatic is one who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.
-- Winston Churchill
-- Winston Churchill
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
--Bertrand Russell
--Bertrand Russell
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
--Ernest Rutherford
--Ernest Rutherford
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
--Aeschylus
--Aeschylus
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
— Hemingway
— Hemingway
I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. ... By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
--E. B. White
--E. B. White
Those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither liberty nor security.
--Ben Franklin
--Ben Franklin
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
--André Aciman
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
--André Aciman
I was, as I had begun to discover even then, the sort who could wear the same clothes and eat the same things and go for a hundred years without getting bored so long as I could entertain wild dreams in the privacy of my imagination.
--Orhan Pamuk
--Orhan Pamuk
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.
--Alfred North Whitehead
--Alfred North Whitehead
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
--Tolstoy
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
--Bertrand Russell
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
--Doug Adams
--Doug Adams
Don’t trust nobody but your mama. And even then, look at her real good.
--Bo Diddley
--Bo Diddley
The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path to the deepest mystery is the path of love.
--André Malraux
--André Malraux
Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, ... before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the broken pulley falls into the well, and the dust returns to the earth as it once was, and the life breath returns to God who gave it.
--Ecclesiastes
--Ecclesiastes
I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun. --Katharine Hepburn
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
--Jack Kerouac
--Jack Kerouac
Before he was many days old he was not only looking like a mouse but acting like one, too -- wearing a gray hat and carrying a small cane.
--E. B. White
--E. B. White
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
--Frank Herbert, Dune
"Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear"
Farewell, and may the blessing of Elves and Men and all Free Folk go with you. May the stars shine upon your faces!
--J.R.R. Tolkien
--J.R.R. Tolkien
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- An exercise in careful writing, traditional grammar and tidy penmanship. This blog is intended to be a collection of essays -- not a journal, a diary, or propaganda for my various causes and enthusiasms. Your comments are very welcome.
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Series of paintings by Louis Wain (1860-1939), painted over time as he descended into schizophrenia.
5 comments:
Yes, and when I heard the news, it brightened my day. That bailout was one of the most ridiculous pieces of legislation ever to be put up for a vote.
I like a lot of what Lou Dobbs says, actually. Do you watch his show often, or are you making this insinuation based on his reputation?
The financial crisis we're now facing was created almost entirely by the policy of central planning of the economy, particularly the artificial manipulation of interest rates by the Federal reserve. Sure, it's made our old-style recessions come fewer and farther between, but it's created a whole host of new problems.
The system has been fundamentally broken by such policies. And it sure as hell ain't gonna be fixed by pumping a shitload of taxpayer money into it.
But if you want the most massive legislated upward redistribution of wealth in history, go ahead and support the thing.
By the way: Why not help out the mortgage-backed security market by bailing out those who hold the mortgages? Help out the homeowners in danger of foreclosure, and you stop the upward chain of defaults, thus fixing the MBS issues, AND you directly help the people (who do, by the way, matter). It'd probably be cheaper, too.
(Just to explain to my vast reading audience, I made a flippant remark about you and Lou Dobbs, which I then deleted because it was just flippant. But you caught it and responded before I had a chance to delete it.)
But my honest reaction to Lou Dobbs is that he is an embarrassing blow-hard who has no business serving as a news analyst. I also am critical of CNN for copying the other cable networks and blending delivery of news and wild statements of personal opinion to the point where it's hard to separate the two.
As for Dobbs, I can go into any tavern in town and have some guy who has had a few too many drinks shout the same mixture of prejudice and half-truths into my ear. As an editorialist, or "analyst," he seems to feel that yelling and rolling his eyes is necessary to make his point.
I watch him with fascination to see if he salivates and drools while he expounds. So, in summary, no, I don't care for him. There are many intelligent people with ideas I dislike who can present them in an effective but civilized manner -- CNN should hire one to replace Dobbs.
Take a look at this column from the New York Times, which sums up my gut reaction to the whole "bail out" situation.
The consequences of any action, or failure to act, by the government is complicated and not easily predictable. I hesitate to jump in with an opinion (guess) as to the ultimate economic consequences of the bail out, because my own background in economics is very limited (an undergrad course in microeconomics, and we are talking about macroeconomic effects).
But it seems to me that sometimes the psychological effects of governmental action, any action, is more important than the actual future economic effects of that action. That was true of FDR, who tried all kinds of actions, some of which worked and some of which were worthless, but all of which gave the impression of leadership and caring by the government.
I'm hoping that a new administration will help restore confidence in leadership. Meanwhile, I'm willing to give Paulson's initiatives -- which follow the recommendations of the great majority of economists -- a chance, in an attempt to avoid a meltdown in the world economy before January.
I respect the arguments against "rewarding Wall Stree," but I think they miss the point with respect to the urgent short term needs of the country. As many have already said, punishment (or more probably, regulation) can be worked out once there some stability has been secured.
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