Quotes By The Day

[conlor]

So can I. But that was years ago. Now I don't trust anyone.

[conlor]

Marshall McLuhan
(7/11/1911-12/31/1980)
Canadian Communications Theorist, Socialogist

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
----------
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
----------
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
----------
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
----------
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
----------
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
----------
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
----------
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
----------
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
----------
Art is anything you can get away with.
----------
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
----------
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
----------
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
----------
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
----------
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
----------
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role. ----------
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
----------
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
----------
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
----------
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
----------
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
----------
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. ----------
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
----------
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
----------
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
----------
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
----------
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
----------
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
----------
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
----------
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
----------
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
----------
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
----------
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
----------
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
----------
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
----------
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
----------
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

[conlor]

Stephen Vincent Benet
(7/22/1898-3/13/1943)
American Poet

Dreaming men are haunted men.
----------
Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
----------
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
----------
Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexed by war,
untrouble by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.
----------
I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat.
----------
Life is not lost by dying;
life is lost minute by minute,
day by dragging day,
in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
----------
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
----------
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

[conlor]

Karl Menninger
(7/23/1893-7/18/1990)
American Psychiatrist

What's done to children, they will do to society.
----------
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
----------
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
----------
One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
----------
One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
----------
Police are not all bad guys. Nobody is all bad guys.
----------
Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.
----------
Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.
----------
The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.
----------
Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.
----------
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.

[conlor]

Ruth Buzzi
(7/24/36 - Age 72)
Comedian ("Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In")

Around 7 years old, we girls took dancing lessons, joined the Brownies, the Girl Scouts, the 4H Club.
----------
I can laugh on cue, and it sounds real. People laugh with me.
----------
I created the characters from what I read in the script. I decided how I should talk, accent, no accent, my own voice, or a created voice. Then, I visualize what I should look like.
----------
I got everybody on my side through comedy.
----------
I really enjoyed doing the voice of Nose Marie on the cartoon series Pound Puppies. Fun, FUN cast.
----------
I really learned the power of the tube on Sesame Street and how it can influence a very young mind.
----------
It's so very important as to what a child watches on TV. I feel for every parent that knows this, and cares, because they only have control of the child's viewing to a certain point.
----------
Life has all sorts of hills and valleys, and sometimes you don't end up doing what you had your heart set out on, but sometimes that's even better!
----------
My nephews all look at me differently now. Before, they couldn't relate to me, and now I'm like a god.
----------
Some of those STINKIN' press people just had to make fun of my decision in joining the show. They also made fun of other choices in my life that I was proud of then and still am now!!!
----------
The funnier the material, the funnier I could make it.
----------
The original Dean Martin Comedy Hour handed me some hysterical sketches. I've got highlights on tons of these variety shows, given to me by their great writers. I'd love to be doing all that again.

[conlor]

Eric Hoffer
(7/25/1902-5/21/1983)
American Philosopher

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
----------
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
----------
Children are the keys of paradise.
----------
Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
----------
Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
----------
It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
----------
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
----------
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
----------
Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
----------
Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
----------
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
----------
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
----------
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
----------
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
----------
The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.
----------
The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.
----------
The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.
----------
The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
----------
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
----------
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
----------
The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
----------
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
----------
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
----------
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
----------
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
----------
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. ----------
Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
----------
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
----------
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
----------
We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.
----------
We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.
----------
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
---------
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
----------
When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
----------
Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
----------
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
----------
You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
----------
Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
----------
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
----------
Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.