— Franz Kafka, Collected Aphorisms
What is to give light must first endure burning.
Viktor Frankl
I did not want to move, for I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could never be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot, the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there would never exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.
Clifford D. Simak
If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.
Confucius
Given enough time, hydrogen starts to wonder where it came from, and where it is going.
How the west is no better than Russia re: Pussy Riot
For the British and US governments to get on high horses about Russian sentencing is hypocrisy. America and Britain damned the “disproportionate” Pussy Riot terms. In America’s case this was from a nation that jails drug offenders for 20, 30 or 40 years, holds terrorism “suspects” incommunicado indefinitely and imprisons for life even trivial “three strikes” offenders. Last week alone a US military court declared that reporting the Guantánamo Bay trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be censored. Any mention of his torture in prison was banned as “reasonably expected to damage national security”. This has no apparent connection to proportionate punishment or freedom of speech.
The Village Voice and the death of alt-weeklies
“The idea of the alternative weekly — that news would be covered absent the agenda of mainstream media and that truths would be told without paying heed to any kind of formal balance or objectivity — has all but been overwhelmed by the Web. Listings, spicy writing, coverage of the next big thing, all of that has been digitized and democratized and many alternatives have ended up looking, of all things, stodgy within this new-media context.”
I always knew looking back on my tears would bring me laughter, but I never knew looking back on my laughter would make me cry.
Cat Stevens
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
