Recent Quotes
Those before us brilliantly used energy and technology to eliminate labor, with industrialism, when our world was full of energy resources and almost empty of workers. But now the world is filling with pollution, full of us seven billion workers, and emptying of resources. We can all do better by shifting from being productive in Read more…
"…The basic nature of the painful transition involves a necessary shift from economies based on maximizing labor productivity (and thereby continually increasing the capital and energy intensity of their industrial production), which heretofore has been based on non-renewable energy, to economies that must now conserve capital, energy and materials and more fully employ their human Read more…
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All concerned should put down the smelling salts, stick the fainting couch back in the closet and deal with reality.
"Fritz gave me courage in my efforts to call economists to account. I used to merely say that economics was getting in the way of citizen's talking ot each other about what is valuable under drastically change dcircumstances. After knowing Fritz, I have had the courage to say that economics is a form of brain Read more…
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Train hard, and eat clean, because you’re worth it!
"We did not vote ourselves into this mess and we can't vote ourselves out of it." – Adolph Reed Jr,
"Just because you have elections doesn't mean you're a democratic country.” –Arundhati Roy
Dashboard You have created 6 post If you look straight ahead, always, you might be forewarned of major pitfalls lying in wait, but you run the risk of being tripped up by those imperceptibly minor ones right at your feet.
Dashboard You have created 6 post If you look straight ahead, always, you might be forewarned of major pitfalls lying in wait, but you run the risk of being tripped up by those imperceptibly minor ones right at your feet.
Unless you opt out for good, abstinence or self-denial can only make you more vulnerable and prompt you to commit that one fatal error.
If you don’t trust yourself fully, you’d become an outcast, but if you trust yourself to the exclusion of everyone else, you’d become an outcaste.
Man/Woman has always been and still is a slave to fresh, young sex (there’s such a phenomenon as fresh, old sex, too), and whatever one might say for/about the high ideals of cultural refinement, man’s humanity to man, and social and economic justice, one cannot mask this truth; man/woman must continue in this humiliating role Read more…
It's easy not to hate; the less you see people, the less you hate, until you're left all to yourself and have only yourself to hate.
If you write a poem a day, you’re most likely to end up a poetaster by the end of the day; that is, at the end of a long and repetitive day. Poets are born and self-made. Shakespeare didn’t take creative writing courses at Iowa, nor Lady Murasaki, Kalidasa, Wu Cheng'en, Cervantes, Voltaire, Dante, Hemingway Read more…
In the long run men [sic–read "people"] hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. (Walden)
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The only thing more surprising than how much dirt comes up when you sweep the kitchen floor is, how much dirt comes up when you sweep the kitchen floor a 2nd time.
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Authority cannot exist without responsibility.
We do not stop playing because we get old; we get old because we stop playing.
"Unless you people get your skulls cracked I'm not even going to come to your funeral" -Gandhi
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From Thomas Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY Scarsdale Vibe was addressing the Las Animas–Huerfano Delegation ofthe Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A) gathered in the casino of an exclusive hot-springs resort up near the Continental Divide. Enormous windows revealed and framed mountain scenery like picture postcards hand-tinted by a crew brought in from across the sea Read more…
But the work of man is only just beginning, and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recessees of our passion and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force. And there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory. – Aimé Césaire
"A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man"
"We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
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"So when you ran for office you built a tremendous amount of trust with the American people, that you seemed like someone who wouldn't move the bar on us," she said. "And it seems, especially in the last year, as if your negotiating tactics have sort of cut away at that trust by compromising some Read more…
None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
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"What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might Read more…
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"Ironically, I had hurt the Democrats by both my victories and my defeats. The loss of health care and the passage of NAFTA demoralized many of our base voters and depressed turnout." —Bill Clinton, in his memoir
"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken." -Tyler Durden
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The late British billionaire Sir James Goldsmith observed how radically global capitalism has shifted, from its Fordist strategy of paying high wages to build the domestic market to seeking the lowest wages available anywhere on the globe. The earlier model of capitalism also partially accepted the notion that the economy was an instrument of meeting Read more…
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"The free-market system blunders into recession; its victims flock to the free-market banner. And here we go again… "The answer to the riddle is as plain as the caviar on a lobbyist's spoon. Democrats don't speak to angry, working-class people because a lot of them can't speak to angry, working-class people. They don't know how. Read more…
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January 24, 2011 'In case you missed it, there is a fierce debate going on. One side, which now controls the House and effectively can block legislation in the Senate, disparages science, wants America to be close to a theocracy, craves a return to Wild West gun-slinging, would gut social insurance, and repeal most of Read more…
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Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!
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You are here: ChicagoTribune.com>Collections>Sarah Palin What others are saying Roger Bybee, In These Times January 04, 2011 In 2006, pollsters and political analysts John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira analyzed Democracy Corps polling data and concluded: "A majority of Americans do not believe progressives or Democrats stand for anything." In other words, it is Read more…
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In criticizing media priorities and biases we often draw on the media themselves for at least some of the facts. This affords the opportunity for a classic non sequitur, in which the citations of facts from the mainstream press by a critic of the press is offered as a triumphant "proof" that the criticism is Read more…
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Renegotiating a social contract today is impossible. Political power has so shifted to those who invest for a living that their poilitical representatives have no incentive to strike a deal.—Jeff Faux, from his book, The Party Isn't Over, 1996
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In past economic crises, populist fervor has been for expanding the power of the national government to address America’s pressing needs. Pleas for making good the nation’s commitment to equality and welfare have been as loud as those for liberty. Now the many who are struggling have no progressive champion. The left have ceded the Read more…
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both."
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It’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy. (emphasis added) The Bushies and Noonans and dwindling retro-moderate Republicans are no less loathed by Palinistas and their Tea Read more…
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“With the recent Supreme Court ruling, we are in a position to be able to take corporate positions that were not previously available in allowing our voices to be heard.” –Roger Nicholson, senior vice president and general counsel of the International Coal Group, a mining company based in WestVirginia, in a letter to other coal Read more…
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"We've lost 152,800 manufacturing jobs [ in Wisconsin] since 2000. According to a new database called Job Tracker launched this month by the AFL-CIO and Working America, in Milwaukee, 47 corporations have outsourced jobs since 2005."–Richard Trumka is AFL-CIO president, and Phil Neuenfeldt is Wisconsin State AFL-CIO president. From article in OCt. 19, 2010 Milwaukee Read more…
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"The [Co-chairs' 'Deficit reduction] proposal seemingly ignores a crucial point: while average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades.So the Bowles-Simpson ["deficit reduction"] Read more…
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"..the way thru premonition is not doubt, said Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling has stated peace is not war. What do you ["R" ] say" said Alan Watts to a maturing words-Philosopher–I was caught betwix UN-declared wars and living w or w.o. nuclear-Molecularist theroretics– rather than human-rights & political-Science (in 1971) ending a war of Read more…
"The only reason for time is so everything doesn't happen all at once." — Albert Einstein
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"A bad rendition of you is better than a good rendition of somebody else."
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"Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top Read more…
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"Income disparities before that crisis [the 1929 stock-market crash] and before the recent one were the greatest in approximately the last 100 years. "In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners received 49.29 percent of total income. "In 2007, the top 10 percent earned a strikingly similar percentage: 49.74 percent. "In 1928, the top 1 Read more…
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"Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?"–NY Times columnist Paul Krugman
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Afghanistanism, as you know, is the practice of referring always to some remote country, place, person or problem when there is something that ought to be taken care of near at home that is very acute.- Robert M. Hutchins, 1955 (hat-tip to Mike Konopacki for finding this quote)