Category: Quote of the Day

“Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left.”

– David M. Ogilvy,
advertising legend

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truths behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.”

– Flannery O’Connor
Wise Blood

“Who is that that says it’s your conscience?” he cried, looking around with a constricted face as if he could smell the particular person who thought that. “Your conscience is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”

– Flannery O’Connor
Wise Blood

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”

– H. L. Mencken

“Nancy Grace, in addition to being the most obnoxious, hate-filled, exploitative wacko bitch anywhere on the public stage, is deeply dishonest, manipulative and phony, and is utterly impervious to shame or guilt over her many instances of malfeasance. The fact that CNN has given that insane harpy a public forum in which to practice her evil, despite the public record of her dishonesty and clear lack of regard for the basic tenets of law, is the greatest indictment of the character of CNN’s management that I can imagine.”

– SDMB member Starving Artist

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

– Karl Marx

“The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she had started from any of the right premises, more might have been expected of her. She lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world outside of which he had never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things. If he had permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight had made them necessary. All of her life had been a struggle to act like a Chestny and to give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to have without the goods a Chestny ought to have;  but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on the hard times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought she had won.

What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought him up successfully and had sent him to college and that he had turned out so well-good looking (her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to be a success), and with a future ahead of him (there was of course no future ahead of him). She excused his gloominess on the grounds that he was still growing up and his radical ideas on his lack of practical experience. She said he didn’t yet know a thing about ‘life,’ that he hadn’t even entered the real world – when already he was as disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.

The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he had turned out so well. In spite of going to only a third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a first-rate education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her foolish views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated by his mother.”

– Flannery O’Connor
“Everything That Rises Must Converge”

“We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs–people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin ‘Dear Sire,’ and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.”

– Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.”

– Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

About Obama’s healthcare reforms:

“Well, my friends in the Obama Administration aren’t going to be very happy with me, but I really, I don’t think it solved any of the important problems that we’re facing with healthcare. So virtually every economist will tell you that there were two things you needed to do to healthcare reform to materially improve the situation. The first was to break the link between the provision of healthcare and employment. And that is just an archaic element of our healthcare system, which really makes no sense. And yet because of tax subsidies, it’s the way most people get their healthcare — through their employer. It shouldn’t be. There’s no good economic justification for it. And yet, if anything, I think this healthcare reform bill actually strengthened that link.  … [Healthcare] is virtually the only part of the economy where I can go out and get any service I want—cancer treatment, open heart surgery, have a wart removed, whatever it is—and I pay $3 for it or $5 for it or nothing, even if it costs $50,000 or $100,000. I mean, imagine if you had the same situation with automobiles. Where I could show up at the car dealership and I could say, ‘I want the Mercedes for free.’ Well, people say, ‘You can’t have the Mercedes for free. You have to pay $50,000 for it.’ You say, ‘Why not, I have an inalienable right to free healthcare. Right? Why don’t I have an inalienable right to a free Mercedes?’”

– Steven D. Levitt,
economist and co-author
of Freakonomics

He said much more about healthcare reform. Go to this page to listen to or download the podcast.