RECENT QUOTES (14)

Goodbye to that country home,
So long to a lady I have known,
Farewell to my other side,
I’d best just take it in stride.
Unfaithful Servant, you’ll learn to find your place;
I can see it in your smile,
and, yes, I can see it in your face.
The memories will linger on,
But the good old days, they’re all gone,
Oh! Lonesome servant, can’t you see,
That we’re still one and the same, just you and me.

ROBBIE ROBERTSON

I have been gone, and some prison warder knows my scream
I’m just trying to fight my way out of this dream

PETE TOWNSHEND

I breathe, my throat clenches
Clutching to exclude
A dozen different stenches
In Falmouth Bay
A blue whale rolls
Going to drown in the swill
From city sewer holes
Summers longer
Deltas gashed
Ancient trees
Uprooted, smashed
Time is generous more, take more
I must outrun the dinosaur

A silent temple
Marble hard
Decays and softens
Battle scarred
A relic deaf
To bits and streams
And polo necks
And perfect jeans
Obsessed with silence
Spiked by noise
I hold my son
I plan our toys
Time expansive more, take more
I must outlive the dinosaur

Rising rivers
Drown new shoots
Words and breath
In death cahoots
The strong survive
To wean more brutes
Who grow and seed
Extend their roots
Cowards, bombs
And scab recruits
Like monkeys trapped
In monkey suits
Time is plentiful more, take more
I must outfight the dinosaur

PETE TOWNSHEND

No one can love without the grace
Of some unseen and distant face

PETE TOWNSHEND

Truth does not exist as merchandise ready-made for delivery; it exists only in methodical movement, in the thoughtfulness of reason.

KARL JASPERS

It is so easy to stand with emotional emphasis on decisive judgments; it is difficult calmly to visualize and to see truth in full knowledge of all objects. It is easy to break off communication with defiant assertions; it is difficult ceaselessly, beyond assertions, to enter on the ground of truth. It is easy to seize an opinion and hold on to it, dispensing with further cogitation; it is difficult to advance step by step and never to bar further questioning.

KARL JASPERS

No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

SHAKESPEARE

Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true mind, and to keep things known in common, serves all being.

HERACLITUS

Although we need the Word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom.

HERACLITUS

The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.

HERACLITUS

Doomsday is near. Die all, die merrily.

SHAKESPEARE

But thought’s the slave of life, and life, time’s fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.

SHAKESPEARE

The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

KARL MARX/FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.

KARL MARX/FRIEDRICH ENGELS

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

KARL MARX/FRIEDRICH ENGELS

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

KARL MARX/FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:

1.   Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2.   A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3.   Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4.   Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5.   Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.   Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7.   Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8.   Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9.   Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10.  Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

KARL MARX/FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Only total conditioning, that is, the total abolition of action, can ever hope to cope with unpredictability. And even the predictability of human behavior which political terror can enforce for relatively long periods of time is hardly able to change the very essence of human affairs once and for all; it can never be sure of its own future. Human action, like all strictly political phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamental conditions of human life insofar as it rests on the fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while. If, therefore, by starting natural processes, we have begun to act into nature, we have manifestly begun to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws. The “iron law” of history was always only a metaphor borrowed from nature; and the fact is that this metaphor no longer convinces us because it has turned out that natural science can by no means be sure of an unchallengeable rule of law in nature as soon as men, scientists and technicians, or simply builders of the human artifice, decide to interfere and no longer leave nature to herself.

HANNAH ARENDT

The key words of modern historiography—“development” and “progress”—were, in the nineteenth century, also the key words of the then new branches of natural science, particularly biology and geology, one dealing with animal life and the other even with non-organic matter in terms of historical processes. Technology, in the modern sense, was preceded by the various sciences of natural history, the history of biological life, of the earth, of the universe. A mutual adjustment of terminology of the two branches of scientific inquiry had taken place before the quarrel between the natural and historical sciences preoccupied the scholarly world to such an extent that it confused the fundamental issues.

HANNAH ARENDT

To act into nature, to carry human unpredictability into a realm where we are confronted with elemental forces which we shall perhaps never be able to control reliably, is dangerous enough. Even more dangerous would it be to ignore that for the first time in our history the human capacity for action has begun to dominate all others—the capacity for wonder and thought in contemplation no less than the capacities of homo faber and the human animal laborans.

HANNAH ARENDT

Love, love, where can you be?
Are you out there looking for me?
Love, love, where can you be?
Love, I am waiting
Heartbeat’s accelerating

Will you come when all is still?
From the river, o’er the hill?
Love, love, where can you be?
Love, I am waiting
Heartbeats accelerating

Will you come on a Saturday night?
Maybe then the time will be right
Love, love, where can you be?
Love, I am waiting
Heartbeat’s accelerating

When you steal into my room
What earthly body will you assume?
Love, love where can you be?
Love, I am waiting
Heartbeat’s accelerating

Love, love, where can you be?
Are you out there looking for me?
Love, love, where can you be?
Are you out there looking for me?
Love, I am waiting
Heartbeat’s accelerating
Love, I am waiting
Heartbeat’s accelerating

ANNA MCGARRIGLE

“Malice is the sin most hated by God.
And the aim of malice is to injure others
whether by fraud or violence. But since fraud

is the vice of which man alone is capable,
God loathes it most. Therefore, the fraudulent
are placed below, and the torment is more painful.

The first below are the violent. But as violence
sins in three persons, so is that circle formed
of three descending rounds of crueler torments.

Against God, self, and neighbor is violence shown.
Against their persons and their goods, I say,
as you shall hear set forth with open reason.

Murder and mayhem are the violation of the person
of one’s neighbor: and of his goods;
harassment, plunder, arson, and extortion.

Therefore, homicides, and those who strike
in malice—destroyers and plunderers—all lie
in that first round, and like suffers with like.

A man may lay violent hands upon his own person
and substance; so in that second round
eternally in vain repentance moan

the suicides and all who gamble away
and waste the good and substance of their lives
and weep in that sweet time when they should be gay.”

DANTE

Today’s “affordability crisis” is not because of carbon taxes but because, in recent decades, business interests have strong-armed governments into redesigning the marketplace to favour their own interests, through tax and regulatory changes, and the rewriting of labour laws to disempower workers.

LINDA MCQUAIG

And if I’m acting like a king don’t ya know it’s ’cause I’m a human being
And if I want too many things don’t ya know it’s ’cause I’m a human being
And if I’ve got to dream don’t ya know it’s ’cause I’m a human being
And when it gets a bit obscene don’t ya know it’s ’cause I’m a human being

JOHNNY THUNDERS/DAVID JOHANSEN

The fundamental experience underlying Cartesian doubt was the discovery that the earth, contrary to all direct sense experience, revolves around the sun. The modern age began when man, with the help of the telescope, turned his bodily eyes toward the universe, about which he had speculated for a long time—seeing with the eyes of the mind, listening with the ears of the heart, and guided by the inner light of reason—and learned that his senses were not fitted for the universe, that his everyday experience, far from being able to constitute the model for the reception of truth and the acquisition of knowledge, was a constant source of error and delusion. After this deception—whose enormity we find difficult to realize because it was centuries before its full impact was felt everywhere and not only in the rather restricted milieu of scholars and philosophers—suspicions began to haunt modern man from all sides. But its most immediate consequence was the spectacular rise of natural science, which for a long time seemed to be liberated by the discovery that our senses by themselves do not tell the truth. Henceforth, sure of the unreliability of sensation and the resulting insufficiency of mere observation, the natural sciences turned toward the experiment, which, by directly interfering with nature, assured the development whose progress has ever since appeared to be limitless.

HANNAH ARENDT

PUNK: How ’bout Springsteen?
REED: Oh, I love him.
PUNK: You do … (?)
REED: He’s one of us.
PUNK: Thank you.
REED: He’s a shit—what are you talking about, what kind of stupid question is that?!

PUNK MAGAZINE

Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.

SHAKESPEARE

Don’t start that talking
I could talk all night
My mind is sleepwalking
While I’m putting the world to right
Call careers information
Have you got yourself an occupation?

Oliver’s army is here to stay
Oliver’s army are on their way
And I would rather be anywhere else
Than here today

There was a Checkpoint Charlie
He didn’t crack a smile
But it’s no laughing party
When you’ve been on the murder mile
Only takes one itchy trigger
One more widow, one less white nigger

Oliver’s Army is here to stay
Oliver’s army are on their way
And I would rather be anywhere else
But here today

Hong Kong is up for grabs
London is full of Arabs
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by the Chinese line
With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne

But there’s no danger
It’s a professional career
Though it could be arranged
With just a word in Mr. Churchill’s ear
When you’re out of luck, your out of work
We could send you to Johannesburg

Oliver’s Army is here to stay
Oliver’s army are on their way
And I would rather be anywhere else
Than here today
And I would rather be anywhere else
Than here today
And I would rather be anywhere else
Oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh

ELVIS COSTELLO

Why are we racing to be so old?
I’m up late pacing the floor
I won’t be told
You have your reservations
I’m bought and sold

I’ll face the music
I’ll face the facts
Even when we walk in polka dots and checker slacks

Bowing and squawking
Running after tidbits
Bobbing and squinting
Just like a minion

Two little Hitlers will fight it out until
One little Hitler does the other one’s will
I will return
I will not burn

Down in the basement
I need my head examined
I need my eyes excited
I’d like to join the party
But I was not invited
You make a member of me
I’ll be delighted

I wouldn’t cry for lost souls who might drown
Dirty words for dirty minds
Written in a toilet town

Got me a Valentine
She’s a smooth operator
It’s all so calculated
She’s got a calculator
She’s my soft touch typewriter
And I’m the great dictator

Two little Hitlers will fight it out until
One little Hitler does the other one’s will
I will return
I will not burn

A simple game of self-respect
You flick a switch and the world goes out
Nobody jumps as you expect
I would have thought you would have had enough by now

You call selective dating
For some effective mating
I thought I’d let you down, dear
But you were just deflating

I knew right from the start
We’d end up hating
Pictures of the merchandise
Plastered on the wall
We can look so long as we don’t have to talk at all

You say you’ll never know him
He’s an unnatural man
He doesn’t want your pleasure
He wants as no one can
He wants to know the names of
All those he’s better than

Two little Hitlers will fight it out until
One little Hitler does the other one’s will
I will return
I will not burn
I will return
I will not burn
I will return
I will not burn

ELVIS COSTELLO

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy

You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

BOB DYLAN

The Manifesto appeared in 1848, on the eve of the revolutions that would bring to a climax a century of Romantic dreams. But this climax turned out to be a catastrophe: The defeats of 1848 to 1851 generated a disenchantment and despair so deep that the very memory of the dream was lost, wiped out, submerged; for a whole century, the politics of authenticity virtually disappeared from the Western imagination. Thus, from the start of the 1850s to the end of the 1950s, in nearly all arguments between radicals and their opponents, both parties identified the capitalist economy and the liberal state with “individualism” and equated radical aims with a “collectivism” that negated individuality. Political thought was frozen into this dualism until the cultural explosion of the 1960s redefined the terms. The New Left’s complaint against democratic capitalism was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough: It forced every individual into competitive and aggressive impasses (“zero-sum games”) which prevented any individual feelings, needs, ideas, energies from being expressed. The moral basis of this political critique was an ideal of authenticity. This outlook was new and yet old, radical yet traditional. Thus the New Left’s lasting cultural achievement—one that may outlive the New Left itself—has been to bring about a return of the repressed, to bring radicalism back to its romantic roots.

MARSHALL BERMAN

These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case …

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce“non “et decor” …
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before,wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

EZRA POUND

Thus, if her colour
Came against his gaze,
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze

He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty had been.

EZRA POUND

Then on an oar
Read this:

“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.”

EZRA POUND

Shakespeare invented literary character as we know it. He reformed our expectations for the verbal imitation of personality and the reformation appears to be permanent and uncannily inevitable. The Bible and Homer powerfully render personages yet their characters are mostly unchanging. They age and die within their stories but their modes of being do not develop.

HAROLD BLOOM

Richard II, the protagonist of the history that begins the Henriad, is a moral masochist whose luxurious self-indulgence in despair augments his overthrow by the usurper Bolingbroke, who thus becomes Henry IV. In the personality of Richard II, Shakespeare prefigures that element in all of us by which we render bad situations even worse through our own hyperbolic language.

HAROLD BLOOM

Directors, actors, playgoers, readers need to understand that Falstaff, most magnificent of wits, is tragicomic. Unlike Hotspur and Hal, he is not one of the fools of time. Dr. Johnson said that love was the wisdom of fools, and the folly of the wise. I cannot think of a better description of my hero Sir John Falstaff.

HAROLD BLOOM

It’s only in the world of TV comedy that characters have next-door neighbors.

PAULINE KAEL

Is there anyone else in Henry IV whose goodness is like bread, like wine? They are scurvy politicians like the King and the brilliant Prince Hal and most of the rebels. They are smug thugs like Prince John and high-spirited killing machines like the captivating Hotspur and Douglas. Falstaff’s followers—Bardolph, Nym, the outrageous Pistol—are entertaining rogues, and Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet are better company than the Lord Chief Justice. Justice Shallow is charmingly absurd and his crony Silence augments the irreality.

HAROLD BLOOM

What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ’Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.

SHAKESPEARE

More than a few scholars of Shakespeare share Hal’s ambivalence toward Falstaff. This no longer surprises me. They are the undead and Falstaff is the everliving. I wonder that the greatest wit in literature should be chastised for his vices since all of them are perfectly open and cheerfully self-acknowledged. Supreme wit is one of the highest cognitive powers. Falstaff is as intelligent as Hamlet. But Hamlet is death’s ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

HAROLD BLOOM

Behind every beautiful thing
There’s been some kind of pain

BOB DYLAN

I’m beginning to hear voices and there’s no one around
Well, I’m all used up, and the fields have turned brown
I went to church on Sunday and she passed by
My love for her is taking such a long time to die

I’m waist deep, waist deep in the mist
It’s almost like, almost like I don’t exist
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

The walls of pride are high and wide
Can’t see over to the other side
It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay
It’s sadder still to feel your heart torn away

One look at you and I’m out of control
Like the universe has swallowed me whole
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

There’s too many people, too many to recall
I thought some of ’em were friends of mine, I was wrong about ’em all
Well, the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud
Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood

I found my world, found my world in you
But your love just hasn’t proved true
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound
twenry miles out of town in cold irons bound

Oh, the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads
I tried to love and protect you because I cared
I’m gonna remember forever the joy that we shared

Looking at you and I’m on my bended knee
You have no idea what you do to me
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound
twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

BOB DYLAN