Sunbeams

Politicians are the same all over; they promise to build a bridge even where there is no water.

Nikita Kruschchev

Spread ideas that undercut the content world of Amerika. We must alienate middle-class Amerika. All watches and clocks will be destroyed; barbers will go to rehabilitation camps where they will grow their hair long.

Jerry Rubin, 1967

Let’s make capitalism work for everybody.

Jerry Rubin, 1980

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

H.L. Mencken

For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.

Frantz Fanon

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad

A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.

Lewis H. Lapham

Most of us continue to work for wages in a highly unequal social system that denies us meaningful work and a decent return for our labor. That simple fact defines a set of common interests of immense democratic potential.

Charles Bergquist

There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicans’ advice not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.

Russell Baker

With words we govern men.

Benjamin Disraeli

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.

G.K. Chesterton

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cinema, radio, television, and magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen without hearing.

Robert Bresson

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Walker Evans

I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book.

Groucho Marx

From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
from the laziness that is content with half-truths,
from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
O God of Truth, deliver us.

Source unknown

The function of freedom is to free somebody else.

Toni Morrison

The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots. . . . Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.

Cid Corman