Over the past few years, I’ve kept a file on my computer into which a would throw quotes I came across that were funny, interesting, provocative or personally meaningful. And after some content editing, here is is...

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our people, and neither do we." -- President George W. Bush

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signals in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)

The second time you get kicked in the head by a mule, it is not a learning experience
-- Fat Wong

I'm perfectly normal! Just ask the people in my socks!
-- Cindy

"The highest position in a democracy is a citizen!"  Ralph Nader

"If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."
-- Emile Zola

I know another group of people who were just following orders, they were called Nazis.
-- the movie Clerks

What you do with sincerity pays the greatest reward.

Children demand honesty.

"San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people...."
-- Rudyard Kipling

"I think I figured out who has the hardest job in the world: A Japanese skywriter..."
-- annon.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.
-- Gandhi

Earlier ...
Random person - I am the all-powerfull MATTWO and I have powers from every good/badguy in cartoon and video-game history!!! so viallns beware of MATTWO! a.k.a. MATTWO-MON!!
An'Desha - <Stares oddly at strange little schizophrenic man, then clubs him with the Baka Bat> Baka...

"Leave the world of boolean gender."
-- Psykosonik

A little girl (with wide eyes): "Are you a man or a woman?"
Androgyne (smiling): "I most certainly am!"
RuPaul's answer to this was "Honey, I'm versatile!"

You have to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
-- Jim

"I think he's a genius, but he plays it down."
-- Daniel speaking about Dave

The moment I live my life to please others, is the moment I cease to live life.
-- me

"The heart cannot delight in what the mind rejects as false"
-- Clark Pinnock

Your life at times seems to be a dream. You live in a beautiful world of imagination. It's wonderful to see someone who lives in a world of bliss and innocence.
-- Melissa about me

"You delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in an answer it gives to a question of yours, or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx."
-- Kublai Khan

"...the male limits are so tight that breaking almost any rule makes you land on the female territory."
-- Tehanu

"For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners."
-- Matthew 11:18-19

Maybe we should stop fooling people and return to plain "urbanism"...
-- Todd Goldman

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: That if one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
-- Henry David Thoreau

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
-- Cynthia Heimel

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth..." Romans 1:16

"In California, 50 women protested the pending war with Iraq by lying on the ground naked and spelling out the word peace. Right idea, wrong president."
-- Jay Leno

"Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are serviley crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"To my mind, a kind of mild-to-severe schizophrenia results from trying to keep one foot in and one foot out of an authoritarian church or belief system. A person, like a nation, cannot long exist half-slave and half-free. If we nibble at the fruit of the tree of knowledge but still cling to the security of Authority, we are caught in the impossible position of trying to take a journey and stay home at the same time."
-- Hymns to an unknown God, p. 102, New York: Bantam Books

"Integrate the fact of death with public spaces of each neighborhood, and, by its very existence, helps create identifiable neighborhoods and holy ground."
-- C. Alexander, A Pattern Language, p.354

Macintosh for productivity
Linux for development
Palm for mobility
Windows for solitaire
--Yoshi's T-Shirt on The Screen Savers

"Why of course the people don't want war... It is the leaders...who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along...all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
-- Hermann Goering (nazi general)

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
--Bertrand Russell, _Marriage and Morals_, p. 58

We now glimpse the forbidden truths of the invasion of Iraq. A man cuddles the body of his in-fant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in black pursues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family are dead. An American Marine murders a woman because she happens to be standing next to a man in a uniform. "I'm sorry," he says, "but the chick got in the way."
-- John Pilger

"Is President Bush's war in Iraq about oil? Of course it is. Sometimes, the obvious answer is the right one: Oil is a major factor in the President's march to war, just as oil is a major factor in every aspect of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf."
-- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio)

"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
-- Adolph Hitler

...Never in America's history has a president taken our nation into war on such flimsy if not out-and-out fabricated "evidence"; and never in history have a president and his family and friends so directly profited from waging war. They don't even bother to use middlemen for "cover"; the owners and directors of the companies making the munitions and supplying the military's needs are all friends, family and campaign supporters of George W. Bush. The companies awarded the contracts to profiteer off the rebuilding are also friends, family, business partners and campaign contributors of George W. Bush.
-- Madison

I just finished cleaning out my underwear drawer, which included throwing away about $75 worth of garmies including two still in the package..maybe I should have given them to the Salvation Army. I thought I'd feel guilty about tossing them, and I figured when this day came, I'd feel obligated to cut out the little doo-higgies...but NO on both counts.
It sure felt good to make room for my new lacey, spring-colored underwear!  AH feel like a WOMAN agin!
-- Paula P

"I cannot imagine anything more fundamental to liberty and freedom than being allowed to peacefully go about one's day, to get up in the morning, get dressed, go to work and come home to one's family without harassment, without discrimination and without intimidation."
-- Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco

"We demand compensation from the Americans, but we also demand our town back. Even in Israel they do not shoot children in such numbers when they throw stones in a demonstration."
-- Sheikh Khalaf Abed el-Shebib, a leader in the Iraqi town of Falluja

"Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."
-- US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring.

No one claims to feel happy while being angry.
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Because of the development of science, all countries on earth will have to unite to survive and to make a common front against attack from people from other planets, the politics of the future will be cosmic, or interplanetary.
-- General Douglas MacArthur, NY Times, October 8, 1955

"Every time we do something, you [Shimon Peres] tell me America will do this and will do that... I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister
Knesset, Tel Aviv, October 3, 2001

The media's purpose is to "train the minds of the people to [have] a virtuous attachment to their government."
-- James Mill

It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
-- E.E.Cummings

"The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one."
-- Albert Einstein

Inner tranquillity comes from the development of love and compassion.
-- The Dalai Lama

"Great genius will always encounter fierce opposition from mediocre minds."
-- Albert Einstein

"I would rather keep my mouth shut and be thought a great fool than to open it and leave no doubt."
-- Abraham Lincoln

Utah is to Mormonism as America is to Christianity.
-- Theodore Hirsch

A little discontent goes a long ways.
-- Mike Hughes

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy"
-- Benjamin Franklin

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
-- John Lennon

"The pedestrian remains the largest single obstacle to the free flow of traffic."
-- from a Los Angeles planning report

"You know back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched.  You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true."
-- James Carville

Why pussyfoot around when you can have hard liquor?
-- Lynda Vidales

If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you still get evil.
(also talked about 5% chance of escape & the evil of free speech zones)
-- Michael Badnarik

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do
because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
-- Susan B. Anthony

If Bush is reelected, trust that my predictions will come true. Until then, the world waits with bated breath, whispering the words "Oh, Shit".
-- Michael Berglin

"Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?"
"My dear Doctor, they're all true..."
"Even the lies?"
"Especially the lies."
-- Deep Space Nine

"By God, when you see your beauty you will be the idol of yourself."
-- Rumi

"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."
-- Carl Gustav Jung

"If your lips say yes when your heart says no, you are driving with your foot on the gas and brake at the same time. You will either nullify your efforts or lurch foward in jerking fits and starts. You would do far better to utter a full yes or a full no than to live at cross-purpose.

...Do not settle for half-hearted living. BE TOTAL. Be a compelling creator. If you act without your spirit fully engaged, you sabotage your results before you even begin. When you are fully present, you are powerful indeed! Successful people throw themselves into the task at hand. They know what they are here to do, capitalize on opportunities, and do not abandon their dreams when faced with a challenge. If you wish to attain that kind of mastery, your yes must be total, so must your no.

...If you sell yourself out to get approval, you will miss what you really want: AUTHENTICITY, PASSION, and ALIVENESS. When you say no to what does not match your intentions, you are saying yes to what you really want and you are one step closer to it. People with integrity will respect you more, not less, for following your truth. If people criticize or reject you for being authentic, do you really want to be with them?

When you stand in your truth, you will find out who your friends are. It is far better to have a few good friends who accept you for who you are than a lot of 'friends' who accept you because you are doing the dance they expect. The only thing more important than people liking you is liking yourself. If you can 'sleep in your own skin' at night, your life is a huge success."
-- Alan H. Cohen from Why Your Life Sucks

There is a beauty in the inner you that the outer you has never touched. And when the inner you awakens, you will be met by those who are eagerly waiting for you to join them.
-- Neville

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
 Live the life you have imagined!"
-- Thoreau

"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defense, followed by rapid and audacious attack."
-- Karl Rove 9/4/85

Jesus is in fact, an Avatar of the Light who "incarnated" here to remind and to reawaken the "sleeping" Divine beings of their true Divine origin.
-- Amitakh Stanford

After three days man grows weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy. -- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac, June 1733)

When there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage. -- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac, May 1734)

The gods help them that help themselves.
-- Aesop (Hercules and the Wagoner)

There was never a good war or a bad peace.
-- Benjamin Franklin

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
-- MLK

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
-- MLK

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-- MLK

Trust thyself: every heart virbrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genious of their age, betraying [or revealing] their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
-- Emerson

24% of illegal drug users are latino and black, but 90% of those in prison for illegal drug use are latino and black.
- stats

"Being powerful is like being a lady -- if you have to tell someone you are, your aren't."- Margaret Thatcher

"The open-minded see the truth in different things: the narrow-minded see only the differences."

Clean water is dangerous stuff to cheap metal.
- Cindy

"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.  You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read.  You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride.  And you cannot oppress the people who are not afraid any more."
-- Cesar E. Chavez

People who are riddled with doubts tend to be dogmatists who are never wrong.
-- John Powell

"After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."
-- James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, in public testimony.

"If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room."
-- Bob Brozeman

"Strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking."
-- Ross Lovegrove

When one is insecure of themselves somewhere, they have to make up for it elsewhere.
-- Lynda

"I have seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the Philippines. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land. . . . I have a strong aversion to sending our bright boys out there to fight with a disgraced musket under a polluted flag."
-- Mark Twain, Vice President, Anti-Imperialist League, 1900

"If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance  for you to contribute to making a better world. That's your choice."
-- Noam Chomsky

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. -- Karl Marx

And even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage
-- Anais Nin
 

Courage comes from within.

"A lifetime, a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour, a minute, a second , and even the "tock" in between "the tick" are a valuable resource.  They provide you a chance to DO.  A little done at a time provides a lifetime of accomplishments."

"The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of a larger idea, never returns to its original size."
 

"I truly believe that J.R Tolkien translated the Lord of the Rings. What a great book. Middle Earth must have existed. It is impssible to make that up."
-- Arnie N.

So what you're saying is you want to fly on a magic carpet to see the king of the potato people?
-- Rimmer in Red Dwarf

Times have changed,
Our kids are getting worse
They won't obey their parents,
They just want to fart and curse. Should we blame the government, or blame society, or should we blame the images on tv No!
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!

In 1879, Emma, widow of Joseph Smith, described the process of translating the golden plates thus:
"In writing for your father I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us"
(Emma Bidamon Smith interview, 1879, available in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, Volume 1, p. 541)

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
-- Samuel Johnson

From Star Trek: First Contact:
Jean-Luc Picard: Maximum setting. If you'd fired this, you would have vaporized me.
Lily: It's my first ray gun
----------------------------------------
Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th Century.
Lily: No money? You mean you don't get paid?
Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

"Government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like "sensitive security information." NYTimes 7/3/05

"The war crimes committed by this president are incredible. Where were the federal bureaucracy, the military?"
-- Seymour Hersh, Financial Times (UK) 6/24/05

Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations.
-- Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837

It is the loss of faith in our personal power that drives the woes of the world...When people are made to feel powerless, either by religious despot or political preacher, they feel despair, even if they disguise the anxiety and pain of that powerlessness as piety or as patriotism--or both...If the great majority of America's are feeling insecure and fearful of the future of their children's futures--what might the master politicians do to redirect that fear? Well, you have seen misdirected into piety and false patriotism...You have seen it with your own eyes. People take their anger out with ballot measures against their gay neighbors. They de-fund our poverty programs and public schools. They intrude on the privacy of people in their most personal decisions of life and death, depriving them of their power over their own lives and bodies. They applaud the attack of other countries on false evidence and they allow the mistreatment of their men, women and children of those countries with mass killings, torture, and a shedding of the Geneva Convention. They meekly allow the anthrax attack on the minority leaders of our Congress so that those leaders will step to a more military march, and they accept the fact that this attack, made with the most traceable of chemicals, has produced no arrests. They accept that, in the last election, electronic voting machines gave a five percent deflection from exit polls, all in the same political direction, and they accept the fact that this horror is not even reported by the media. Accept no leaders who would lead you with fear or anger, who are forever dividing and punishing the people instead of uniting, encouraging and empowering them. Great leaders lead from a better vision of a possible future. Great leaders—and you must include yourself in this—lead themselves, their families, friends, communities, nations and their world from the great, golden idea that people should be free and should in every way be encouraged to fulfill their highest potentials and live life responsibly as they choose. Great leadership comes from love, and great societies come from confident, mass empowerment
-- Doris "Granny D" Haddock speaking at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, May 21, 2005

"To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me."
- Sgt. Camilo Mejia, who served one year in prison for refusing to return to fight in Iraq. He was released from prison Feb. 15, 2005

   Despise violence. Despise national vanity and self-love. Protect the territory of conscience.
   Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American. Go even further: try to imagine at least once a day that you belong to the vast, the overwhelming majority of people on this planet who don't have passports, don't live in dwellings equipped with both refrigerators and telephones, who have never even once flown in a plane.
   Be extremely skeptical of all claims made by your government. Remember, it may not be the best thing for America or for the world for the president of the United States to be the president of the planet. Be just as skeptical of other governments, too.
   It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
   It's good to laugh a lot, as long as it doesn't mean you're trying to kill your feelings.
   Don't allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to - which, if you are a woman, happens, and will continue to happen, all the time.
   Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. ... Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. It's all about taking in as much of what's out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you'll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
   You'll notice that I haven't talked about love. Or about happiness. I've talked about becoming - or remaining - the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it's all about. It's not. It's about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.
-- Susan Sontag, Author at Vassar College - on receiving her honorary degree May, 2003

"I don't like to make people uncomfortable.  I like to make people think, even if that makes them uncomfortable."
-- Patricia Ireland

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
-- Pat Robertson about Hugo Chavez

"but if you only have love for your own race/then you only leave space to discriminate/and to discriminate only generates hate"
-- Black Eyed Peas "Where is the Love?"

"No wonder I'm all confused -- one of my parents was a woman, the other was a man." --Ashleigh Brilliant