new fortune cookies, part 1 of 2

[Karl Lehenbauer]

This file and the one following it contain quotes, sayings, aphorisms,
fortune cookies and so forth that I've collected over the last few
months from net postings and signatures, books, magazines and such.

Please forward any corrections in attributions, etc, to me.  I also
collect cookies so please send your fortune cookies to me, if you're
pretty sure they didn't come from here to begin with.

WARNING TO RELIGIOUS FANATICS AND NARROW/CLOSE-MINDED PEOPLE IN GENERAL:
Exercise your right to choose not to read this and help me exercise the
right of free speech for myself and everyone quoted herein by not
reading this if you think you are likely to be offended by it.  Thank you.

---------------- cut here ------------------------------------
%%
"I hate quotations.  Tell me what you know."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
-- Abe Lincoln
%%
"If we can't fix it -- we'll fix it so nobody can."
-- B. Gibbons
%%
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves
 on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
-- D. P. Barron
%%
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two
great outrages upon its naive self-love.  The first was when it realized that 
our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system
of a magnitude hardly conceivable...  The second was when biological research 
robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created, and
relegated him to a descent from the animal world.    
-- Sigmund Freud  
%%
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect."
-- Keats
%%
"You killed Ted, you medieval dickweed!"
-- Bill
%%
"If you took all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it in the navel of a fruit
 fly, you'd still have room for three carraway seeds and a producer's heart."
 -- Fred Allen
 %%
"Now, more than ever, it is evident that `good taste' only refers to that
 which reinforces the status quo." 
-- Andre Peret
%%
"Computers are useless; they can only give answers."
-- Picasso
%%
"Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the American people should
 not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that
 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that
 satanists are taking over America's day care centers...  An unjustified
 crusade against those perceived as satanists could result in wasted resources,
 unwarranted damage to reputations, and disruption of civil liberties."
-- Kenneth Lanning, head of the FBI's special unit in charge of
    investigating claims about satanic-cult crimes, in a report
    of his findings, June, 1989
%%
"What's the definition of a good flame?  One you agree with..."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers."
-- Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM (around 1948)
%%
"I do not fear computers.. I fear the lack of them."
-- Isaac Asimov
%%
"Rebellion is like witchcraft. That's what it is, it's like witchcraft."
-- Missouri State Rep. Jean Dixon, on labeling "offensive music". 
	USA Today, March 20, 1990
%%
"I am made from the dust of the stars, the oceans flow in my veins."
-- Rush, "Presto"
%%
"Reading legal mush can turn your brain to guacamole!" 
-- Amiga ROM Kernel Manual
%%
"I think their experience with us may have helped their contemptuousness;
 the ignorance they come by naturally."
--Chuck McManis (personal communication)
%%
  Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of the
earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the Cartha-
ginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave people.
Also we saw Caesar invade Britain -- "not that those barbarians had done him
any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the blessings
of civilization upon their widows and orphans," as Satan explained.
  Next, Christianity was born.  Then ages of Europe passed in review before us,
and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages,
"leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and other signs of the
progress of the human race," as Satan observed.
  And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars -- all over 
Europe, all over the world.  "Sometimes in the private interest of royal
families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war
started by the aggressor for any clean purpose -- there is no such war in the
history of the race."
  "Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and you
must confess that it is wonderful -- in its way.  We must now exhibit the 
future."
  He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more
devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.
  "You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress.  Cain did 
his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords;
the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military
organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder; a
few centuries from now he will have so greatly improved the deadly effectiveness
of his weapons of slaughter that all men will confess that without Christian
civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of 
time."
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%%
  "Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more
desire to throw a stone than you had."
  "Satan!"
  "Oh, it's true.  I know your race.  It is made up of sheep.  It is governed
by minorities, seldom or never by majorities.  It suppresses its feelings and
its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.  Sometimes the
noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.
The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-
hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive
and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.  Think of it!  One
kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps
in iniquities which revolt both of them.  Speaking as an expert, I know that
ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of
witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics
in the long ago.  And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted
prejuidice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart
into the harrying of a witch.  And yet apparently everybody hates witches and
wants them killed.  Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make
the most noise -- perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a
determined front will do it -- and in a week all the sheep will wheel and 
follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end."
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%%
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect
in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for
safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye.  These
institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you,
affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of
minorities.  There was never a country where the majority of people were in
their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%%
Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all dreams:
a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad
ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single 
happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; 
who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children
to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children
with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and
invented hell -- mouths mercy and invented hell -- mouths Golden Rules, and
forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who frowns
upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then
tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of
honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with 
altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%%
You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you
possess that.  This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and
trivial things -- broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities,
evokers of the horse-laugh.  The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which
exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision.  Will a day come when the
race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them -- and
by laughting at them destroy them?  For your race, in its poverty, has
unquestionably one really effective weapon -- laughter.  Power, money,
persuasion, supplication, persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug --
push it a little -- weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter
can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.  Against the assault of laughter
nothing can stand.  You are always fussing and fighting with your other
weapons.  Do you ever use that one?  No; you leave it lying rusting.  As a
race, do you ever use it at all?  No; you lack sense and the courage."
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%%
"If you do everything, you'll win."
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson
%%
    Catch a fly. Put it in the freezer compartment of your refrigerator for
    5 to 10 minutes. This slows him down considerably, so he's easier to
    handle. While he's in there, make a miniature paper airplane with a
    wing-span about double that of the fly. Take the cool dude out of the
    ice-box and super glue his tiny feet onto the upper surface of the paper
    airplane. As he warms up and revives, he will begin doing that most
    natural of all fly activities: he will try to fly. If you have not made
    your little airplane too heavy, the fly's wing beats will be adequate
    for lift off. However, carrying the added weight quickly tires the fly,
    so in mid-air, he will stop beating his wings, and the airplane will
    soar downward. Seeing his plight causes the fly to once again attempt to
    fly, with the same result. Little bursts of energy as the plane gains
    altitude, alternated with slow downward glides. A thread super glued to
    the plane will keep your aerial circus in the same room, or you can take
    your new pet fly out for a walk, er, fly.
-- Gary Benson (inc at fluke.tc.com)
%%
   "Mathematicians stand on eaach other's shoulder,
    Computer Scientists stand on each other's toes."
-- someone on the net (please email attribution), about look&feel lawsuits
%%
"I am thankful for one leg.  To limp is no disgrace --
 I may not be number one, but I can still run the race." 
-- B.C.
%%
"God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be
 seen."
- S. Hawking
%%
"Those who worked the hardest are the last to surrender."
-- Gary Ward
%%
"They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true
freak cannot be made.  A true freak must be born."
-- K. Dunn, _Geek Love_
%%
"The raytracer of justices recurses slowly, but it renders exceedingly fine."
-- Larry Phillips (lphillips at lpami.wimsey.bc.ca)
%%
"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of
government!"
-- M. Python
%%
                          (####)
                        (#######)
                      (#########)
                     (#########)
                    (#########)
                   (#########)
   __&__          (#########) 
  /     \        (#########)   |\/\/\/|     /\ /\  /\               /\
 |       |      (#########)    |      |     | V  \/  \---.    .----/  \----. 
 |  (o)(o)       (o)(o)(##)    |      |      \_        /       \          /
 C   .---_)    ,_C     (##)    | (o)(o)       (o)(o)  <__.   .--\ (o)(o) /__.
  | |.___|    /____,   (##)    C      _)     _C         /     \     ()     / 
  |  \__/       \     (#)       | ,___|     /____,   )  \      >   (C_)   <
  /_____\        |    |         |   /         \     /----'    /___\____/___\ 
 /_____/ \       OOOOOO        /____\          ooooo             /|    |\
/         \     /      \      /      \        /     \           /        \
  
Homer          Marge           Bart            Lisa            Baby Maggie

                                THE SIMPSONS
%%
"Jesus saves sinners... and redeems them for valuable cash prizes!"
-- John Wichers (wichers at husc4.HARVARD.EDU)
%%
"Perestroika: could it happen here?"
-- Tom Neff
%%
"We walked on the moon -- you be polite." 
-- Joni Mitchell
%%
"My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch?  Next April?" 
-- L. Mulloy
%%
"UNIX should be used as an adjective." 
-- AT&T
%%
"The real problem with SDI is that it doesn't kill anybody."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch!"
"Roger....hatch blown!" 
-- MAROONED
%%
"We have luck only with women -- not spacecraft!"
-- R. Kremnev, builder of failed Soviet FOBOS probes
%%
"The Nazis have no sense of humor, so why should they want television?"
-- Philip K. Dick
%%
"NASA Announces New Deck Chair Arrangement For Space Station Titanic."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"Knowing when to optimize is as important as knowing how."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will -- that will uncover a
lot of things.  You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things...
This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have
nothing to do with ourselves." 
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon, 6/23/72
%%
"Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat."
-- Thiokol management, 1/27/86

"The filter has discreting sources."
-- KSC FIDO, 1/28/86
%%
"When I was [in Canada] I found their jokes like their roads -- not very
 long and not very good, leading to a little tin point of a spire which
 has been remorselessly obvious for miles without seeming to get any
 nearer."
-- Samuel Butler
%%
"Nature loves a vacuum.  Digital doesn't." 
-- DEC sales letter
%%
"I'm a Leo.  Leos don't believe in this astrology stuff."
-- Tom Neff
%%
 1955-1975: 36 Elvis movies.
 1975-1989: nothing.
-- Tom Neff
%%
"A man came into the the office one day and said he was a sailor.  We
cured him of that." 
-- Mark Twain, on his days as a doctor's apprentice in California
%%
"We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost... the right of
 free speech will be extinguished throughout the world."
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon, 10/27/65
%%
"The country couldn't run without Prohibition.  That is the industrial fact."
-- Henry Ford, 1929
%%
"We plan absentee ownership.  I'll stick to building ships."
-- George Steinbrenner, 1973
%%
Canada: a few acres of snow.  
-- Voltaire
%%
"There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level
 wouldn't cure. "
-- Ross MacDonald
%%
"Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure."
-- Karl Kraus
%%
"To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois."
-- Jules Renard
%%
"War is like love; it always finds a way."
-- Bertold Brecht
%%
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make any clear-cut stupid
 moves, only complicated stupid moves that leave us scratching our heads
 wondering if we might possibly have missed something."
-- Gamel Abdel Nasser
%%
"Stalinism begins at home."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"If the human mind were simple enough to understand,
we'd be too simple to understand it."
-- Pat Bahn
%%
"NASA Awards Acronym Generation System (AGS) Contract For Space Station Freedom"
-- Tom Neff
%%
"US out of North America, NOW!!"
-- Richard O'Rourke
%%
"Why don't the Japanese live in the mountains?  Certainly, they could;
 apparently they just don't want to."
-- elturner at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
%%
You are sunlight and I, moon
  Joined by the gods of fortune
Midnight and high noon
  Sharing the sky
We have been blessed, you and I
-- MISS SAIGON
%%
"Democracy is also a form of worship.  It is the worship of Jackals by
 Jackasses."
-- H. L. Mencken
%%
Chown up.  Chow down.
%%
"I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake."
-- _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt
%%
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the
 whole American people which declared that their legislature
 should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
 or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a
 wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, to the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association in 1802
%%
"The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."
-- John Philpot Curran
%%
"Home is is the place where your computer lives and runs your life."
-- Chrome Cowboy, sobiloff at thor.acc.stolaf.edu
%%
"I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years
 of maturity." 
-- Albert Einstein
%%
"Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you see."
-- Will Rogers
%%
"Do what you wanna, do what you will;
 Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill.
 And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
 To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip."
    - Frank Zappa, "You Are What You Is"
%%
"Like the ski resort full of girls looking for husbands
 and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as 
 symmetrical as it might seem."  
-- Alan McKay
%%
"If all men were brothers, would you want one to marry your sister?"
is the title of a Theodore Sturgeon short story.
%%
"Not problem is too big it can't be run away from" 
-- Linus
%%
"Oh beautiful, for smoggy skies, o'er insectide waves of grain, and
 strip-mined mountain's majesty, above the asphalt plains!  America,
 America, man sheds his waste on thee!  And hides the pines, with
 billboard signs, from sea to oily sea!"
-- George Carlin (?)
%%
"You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on
 the continuing viability of Fortran."
-- Alan Perlis
%%
"We fall into error if we attribute to strategy a power
  independent of tactical results."
-- Karl von Clausewitz, On War
%%
Without a thorough understanding of tactics, there can be no effective
strategy; therefore, any general must have a good foundation in the
tactical aspects of warfare.  However, it is not necessary for a general
to be an excellent swordsman, musketeer, or tank gunner.  It is sufficient
to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and proper use of the forces
available, and to know the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy.
-- Phillip Harbison (alvitar at xavax.com)
%%
In article <REYNOLDS.90Jul17202859 at cochlea.bu.edu> reynolds at cochlea.bu.edu
(John Reynolds) writes:
>Robert Tilton Ministries
>Box 819000 Dallas, TX 75381
>* Complete Instructions on How to Receive your Miracle (That is, send
>in "more money than you can afford", three times in 21 days)

It really works!  We prayed for OpenWindows V2 to ship on schedule and it
happened!  We didn't send him any money and a disk blew up on our server!
Praise ``Bob''!

-- david at eng.sun.com
%%
The following appeared in my MCI bill this month:

MCI> President Bush is proclaiming July 22 as Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
MCI> Family Appreciation Day, in honor of the 100th birthday of one of
MCI> America's most beloved and respected citizens.  Throughout her life,
MCI> family has been of utmost importance to Mrs. Kennedy.  Family 
MCI> Appreciation Day calls upon Americans to rededicate themselves to family
MCI> values and relationships...
[ they then go on to encourage people to use the telephone a lot. ]

This Sunday, I encourage the following activities:

o Fornicate
o Get a divorce
o Shoot suction-cup darts at photos of JFK
o Fornicate
o Call up your long-distance operator and emit an ear-piercing shreik
o Tell your parents how they've screwed you up for life
o Assist a gay couple in adopting or conceiving
o Use the word "Chappaquiddick" (sic?) in a sentence
o Buy your pre-adolescent children a copy of Blue Boy
o Fornicate
o Spit on a rich person
o Fornicate

Thank you.

- Erb (cooper at cs)
Church of the Four-day Workweek
%%
"Poor dead, there's nothing between his ears."
-- Margaret Thatcher, about Ronald Regan, 
	in the 6/2/88 issue of The New York Times
%%
"Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by 
 a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly." 
-- Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction author, Mormon, weenie
%%
"C is the assembly language of Tcl."
-- Karl Lehenbauer (karl at hackercorp.com)

"Assembly language is also available."
-- Jordan Henderson  (jordan at hackercorp.com)
%%
"All modern American literature comes from one book
 by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
-- Ernest Hemingway
%%
The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their
own, resembling the affection of authors for their poems, or of parents for
their children ... and hence they are very bad company, for they talk of
nothing but the praises of wealth.
-- Plato
%%
"I have been poor and I have been rich.  Rich is better."
-- Sophie Tucker
%%
Mature software:  code old enough that for every bug fixed, one or more new
bugs are created.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead."
-- W. Shakespeare, HAMLET
%%
"Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible -
yea, and get the better of them."
-- W. Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR
%%
   "People these days are reluctant to read the canonical texts, but they
love fiction. Not all fiction, mind you, for they are sick of exemplary themes
and far prefer the obscene and fantastic. How low contemporary morals have
sunk! Anyone concerned about public morality will want to retrieve the
situation."
-- Li Yu, in "The Carnal Prayer Mat" c. 1657 A.D.
%%
                                _
                               / \
                              |\_/|
                              |---|
                              |   |
                              |   |
                            _ |=-=| _
                        _  / \|   |/ \
                       / \|   |   |   ||\
                      |   |   |   |   | \>
                      |   |   |   |   |   \
                      | -   -   -   - |)   )
                      |                   /
                       \                 /
                        \               /
                         \             /
                          \           /
                           |         |
                           |         |
                           |         |

-- Michael Westlund (d90-mwd at sigma.sm.luth.se)
%%
> The Independent quotes this from The Progressive, Sept. 1990:
> 
> "Louisiana State Rep. Carl Gunter, explaning why abortion should
> not be permitted even when the pregnancy results from incest:
> 'The way we get thoroughbred horses is through inbreeding.  With
> incest, you could get super-smart kids.'"

This undoubtedly explains State Representative Gunter's visibly high 
intelligence...
-- Lefty (lefty at twg.com)
%%
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in
 the process he does not become a monster."
-- Nietsche
%%
"Memory serves wise commanders."
-- Tz'u-hsi, 638 AD
%%
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
-- Freeman Dyson
%%
"But then a new problem came up: the Jupiter probe, Galileo, was going to
 use a power supply that runs on heat generated by radioactivity. If the
 shuttle carrying Galileo failed, radioactivity could be spread over a
 large area."
-- Richard P. Feynmann, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
%%
"If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 
 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap." 
-- Richard P. Feynmann, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
%%
Congresswoman:  Well, Mr. Dallas... we've heard your smut masquerading as
songs... and we've heard how teen prostitution pregnancy, drug use, cults,
runaways, suicide and poor hygiene are sweeping this nation.  We thought you
might like to share with the committee any particular causes you might see
for those latter problems...

Steve Dallas:  I dunno.  Maybe the proliferation of narrow, suffocating
zealotry masquerading as parenting in this country.

-- Bloom County
%%
"In Germany they first came for the Communists, 
   and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, 
   and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
   and I didn't speak up becaues I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
   and I didn't speak up becaue I was a Protestant.  
Then they came for me -
   and by that time no one was left to speak up."

-- Pastor Martin Niemoller 
%%
"You can't get snot off of a suede jacket."
-- Lenny Bruce
%%
"A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
 He follows a lifestyle we don't endorse,
 He drinks the blood of a sheep, by force,   
 The vampire horse, Count Ed!"               
 -- Ron (lev0 at midway.uchicago.edu)
%%
[Pornography] causes premarital intercourse, perversion, masturbation in
boys, wantonness in girls... Attention is given to sensationalists such
as Kinsey and Eberhard... who, finding fellow travelers in erstwhile
respectable media, manage to disseminate, directly and indirectly,
their absurd and dirty bleatings and pagan ideas.  It seems strange to
me that we credit -- I should say that our mass media credit -- the
unestablished generalities of a few so-called experts, but ignore the
overwhelming testimony of the true experts like J. Edgar Hoover.
-- Charles H. Keating, Jr., former anti-porn activist, the financier
    behind the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal (his anti-porn organization
    got in trouble in 1962 (!) for spending over 90% of the funds they
    raised)
%%
"If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected
 within you is destroyed."
-- Kahlil Gibran, 1923
%%
"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that
 they are extreme, but that they are intolerant.  The evil is not what
 they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
-- Robert F. Kennedy
%%
In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people
who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would
not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the
importance of which is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the
reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade
others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, for the purpose
of removing this difficulty, resort to divine authority.
-- Machiavelli
%%
All religions have in common the periodical childlike surrender to a
Provider or providers who dispense earthly fortune as well as spiritual
health; some demonstrations of man's smallness by means of reduced
posture and humble gesture, the admission in prayer and song of misdeeds,
of misthoughts, and of evil intentions; fervent appeal for inner uni-
fication by divine guidance; and finally, the insight that individual
trust must become part of the ritual practice of man, and must become
a sign of trustworthiness in the community.
-- psychologist Erik Erikson
%%
When one studies the biographies of the founders and leaders of the various
religions, one cannot help but be struck by the psychotic -- or at least
extremely abnormal -- behavior that has characterized so many of them.
Luther, Wesley, and Loyola had hallucinations ("visions").  St. Theresa
almost certainly was a hysteric.  The book _The Psychotic Personality_,
by Leon J. Saul and Silas L. Warner, devotes considerable space to the
psychotic personalities of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science),
Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Mohammed, and the Rev. Jim Jones...
It seems significant that the founder of Christianity itself, St. Paul,
also suffered from epilepsy.
-- Frank Zindler, "Religiosity as a Mental Disorder," American Atheist magazine,
   April 1988, p. 27
%%
"For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic
 is fine.  To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a
 church teaching that you must also vote according to that -- that's
 not acceptable in a country based on the First Amendment."
-- Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy
%%
"Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process."
-- Barry Goldwater
%%
"If we are to begin packaging ourselves as boxes of cereal, Democracy will
 die... for you could not win the presidency without proving unworthy of
 the job."
-- Adlai Stevenson
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-- uunet!sugar!karl
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