Quotes from Facebook

Editor’s Note: As I prepare for my exit from Facebook, I came across this list of quotes from a long time ago. They remain some of my favorites.

“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie– deliberate, contrived and dishonest– but the myth– persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” ~ John F. Kennedy

“No ideas but in things” ~ William Carlos Williams

“If each citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes more feeble and consequently more incapable of preserving his freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow citizens for the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would unavoidably increase together with equality.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau

“Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume they sell in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona, carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advised? Known unto these, and to myself disguised! I’ll say as they say and persever so, And in this mist at all adventures go.” ~ William Shakespeare

“Radix malorum est Cupiditas” ~ from Chaucer, but older

“It’s always the old who lead us to the war. Always the young who fall. Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun. Tell me is it worth it all?” ~Phil Ochs

“No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” ~Yoda

“Good navigators are always skeptical, not of the presences of things, but of what they see and understand. Good navigators are almost always lost.” ~Robert Finley

“Why, this is very midsummer madness.” ~ William Shakespeare

“You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live.” ~Saul Bellow

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist…The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ~R. Buckminster Fuller

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne

“We harbor no illusions about the difficulty of bringing about a world without nuclear weapons. We know there are plenty of cynics, and that there will be setbacks to prove their point. But there will also be days like today that push us forward – days that tell a different story.” ~ Barack Obama

“And our mouths shaped words, And our destiny was shaped. With words we made our sacred songs, We took possession of language, And our being was borne on words.” ~ N. Scott Momaday

“As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women’s children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!” ~ James Oppenheim

“Fill ‘er up with love please won’t you mister? Just the hi-test is what I used to say… But that was before I lost my baby, I’ll have a dollar’s worth of regular today.” ~ Phil Ochs

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Just give me the warm power of the sun. Give me the steady flow of a waterfall. Give me the spirit of living things as they return to clay. Just give me the restless power of the wind. Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire. But please take all of your atomic poison power away. ~ John Hall

“But your flag decal won’t get you Into Heaven any more. They’re already overcrowded From your dirty little war. Now Jesus don’t like killin’ No matter what the reason’s for, And your flag decal won’t get you Into Heaven any more.” ~ John Prine