The Simian Line: Miscellaneous 1

I’ll tell you the greatest regret of my life: I let my love go. –Jason Robards, in Magnolia

... chronic remores ... is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can, and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the bset way of getting clean. –Aldous Huxley, the foreward to Brave New World

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable. –Sydney J. Harris, Strictly Personal

There’s no point in regretting the choices you’ve made in your life, because at the time you made them, they seemed like the only option. But you can’t control what follows. –Hermione Norris, in Cold Feet

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. –Mark Twain

That was the way. When the opportunity was at your hand, you did not dare to seize it. When the opportunity was lost, it became precious. –George Stewart, Earth Abides

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. –Book of Common Prayer

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.
–TS Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”

It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize. –Robert Mallett, Apostilles

What’s gone and what’s past help
Should be past grief.
–William Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale”

But the skin of progress
Masks, unknown, the spotted wolf of sameness.
–Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. –George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. –ditto

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. –Adlai Stevenson, in a speech at Princeton University on March 22, 1954

… he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never … make any progress. –Anwar Sadat

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. –Rabindranath Tagore

They were the best of people, and I promised myself that one day I would come and live among them and escape from the increasingly mechanistic mainland world with its March Hare preoccupation with witless production for mindless consumption; its disruptive infatuation with change for its own sake; its idiot dedication to the bitch goddess, Progress. –Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing, speaking of the fishermen of South Newfoundland

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. –Russell Baker

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. –Havelock Ellis

All progress is based on a universal innate desire of every organism to live beyond its means. –Samuel Butler, Notebooks

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. –Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love

… I blow some of my brains out at work every day. My head’s full of bullet holes. It’s what work does to you. –Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

… anticipating future work just made the present moment even more miserable. There was so much unpleasantness in the workday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm’s length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.
But enough about daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work. –Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

The perennial problem, of course, is work. Philip Larkin famously saw it as a toad: a chill, ugly weight that squats on us all, blotting out most of our scant allowance of days. And nor is it the sort of work like fetching water and planting rice that is plausibly useful for survival. On the contrary, nearly all employment is the civilian equivalent of the sort of punishment once meted out to recalcitrant squaddies, such as digging one hole to fill another or whitewashing coal. I’m amazed we kick up so little fuss about the awesome futility of the work most of us do. –James Hamilton-Paterson, Amazing Disgrace

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. –Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

No, I don’t like work … I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work. No man does. But I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality, for yourself, not for others, what no man can ever know. –Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar. –Drew Carey, in The Drew Carey Show

I am through with working. Working is for chumps. –Bart Simpson, in The Simpsons

Lisa, if you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way. –Homer Simpson, in The Simpsons

My father taught me to work, but not to love it. I never did like to work, and I don’t deny it. I’d rather read, tell stories, crack jokes talk, laugh—anything but work. –Abraham Lincoln

It is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of living rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. –Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do

Many … have seen enough deep lines in the tired faces of commuters to suspect that the wrong jobs can become internments for money that will quickly eat up decades. And those who already find themselves mildly successful in a field they have little love for can carry with them the uncomfortable sense of being lifted along into a life they never agreed to live. –Lauren Dockett and Kristin Beck, Facing 30: Women Talk about Constructing a Real Life and Other Scary Rites of Passage

It’s the rare job that doesn’t cause people to get grumpy, overstressed, and old before their time. And we find that as work steals us from our own families, friends, and often even ourselves, there will likely be no immunity for us. –ditto

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is duty, life is slavery. –Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies. –Rudyard Kipling, The Phantom Rickshaw

Nobody goes right to work. I mean, screw the company—those first twenty minutes belong to you. –George Carlin

Most people are paid just enough to keep them from quitting, for working just hard enough to keep from getting fired. –ditto

Work is not the curse, but drudgery is. –Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great. –Mark Twain, “A Humorist’s Confession”

I do not like work even when someone else does it. –Mark Twain, “The Lost Napoleon”

John C. McGinley: Looks like you’ve been missing quite a bit of work lately.
Ron Livingston: Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob.
–in Office Space

So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life. –Ron Livingston, in Office Space

Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late; I use the side door ... After that I sorta space out for an hour. …Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. –ditto

Work isn’t supposed to interfere with your life, it’s supposed to pay for it! –Christine Taylor, in Party Girl

Man, I hate work. Even when somebody else is doing it. –Max Perlich, in Cliffhanger

If you have a job without any aggravations, you don’t have a job. –Malcolm S. Forbes

I’ve met a few people in my time who were enthusiastic about hard work. And it was just my luck that all of them happened to be men I was working for at the time. –Bill Gold

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.” –Dave Barry, Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence. –Honoré de Balzac, “Scenes de la vie Parisienne,” La Maison Nucingen

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. –Robert Benchley

Even if you are lazy and would rather roll over and die, there are jobs for your mindset! … Everyday you will come home exhausted out of your mind. You won’t have time to worry about how much things suck because you will just be grateful to God that you are not working. This cycle continues until you die. –seen on the internet

My career is a fascist state. I’m the dictator, the chief of police, the head of the army. Anybody who tries to interfere is put up against the wall and shot. –Michael Caine

I always thought that if I were popular, I must be doing something wrong. –Suzanne Vega

To be popular one must be a mediocrity. –Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion. –Mark Twain, Notebook

Avoid popularity, if you would have peace. –Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Louis Klopsch’s Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age

Avoid popularity, it has many snares, and no real benefit. –William Penn, Fruits of Solitude: In Reflections and Maxims Relating to the Conduct of Human Life

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them. –Immanuel Kant

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. –Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe. –HL Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done with you. –Jean-Paul Sartre

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. –Johann Wolfgang von Göethe

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds. –Bob Marley, “Redemption Song” (the phrase originally came from Marcus Garvey)

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. –Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to HL Pierce

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. –Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to never practice either. –Mark Twain, Following the Equator

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. –Abraham Lincoln, in a speech in Peoria, IL, on October 16, 1854

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. –Thurgood Marshall, Stanley v. Georgia

There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. –Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in a 1967 interview

The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people. –Helen Keller, in The Home Magazine, April 1935

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen. –Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution

All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. –Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters

Democracy, then, cannot be government by the people: it can only be government by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, when democratic statesmen propose to govern us by our own consent, they find that we don’t want to be governed at all, and that we regard rates and taxes and rents and death duties as intolerable burdens. What we want to know is how little government we can get along with without being murdered in our beds. –George Bernard Shaw, The Apple Cart

Fear is the foundation of most governments. –John Adams, Thoughts on Government

People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people. –Hugo Weaving, in V for Vendetta

... while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the annunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance, and depression. And where once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well, certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. –ditto

The Republican convention started this past weekend, so don’t forget to turn your clocks back four hundred years. –Jay Leno, in the Tonight Show

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. –HL Mencken, Notebooks

Democracy cannot survive without the guidance of a creative minority. –Harlan F. Stone

Undemocratic countries have always tried to prohibit their citizens from destroying themselves. –Mati Unt, Things in the Night

If you want to have gay sex or visit a library, it’s probably your last night to do those things. Personally, I’ll be killing two birds with one stone. –Ed Helms, in The Daily Show, re: election night 2004

Well, Jon, the great jousting tournament that is Election Day draws nigh, the prize the building you see behind me, Castle Congress. But what side shall prevail in this epic electoral tilt? Who shall control the future of Fortress America? Will we be, as the Republicans desire, a nation of wealthy heavily armed white men, befouling the air and water in a ceaseless quest for profits, beholden to no laws but those of our lord and savior Jesus Christ? Or shall we instead embrace the Democrats’ vision of a namby-pamby quasi-Socialist Republic with an all-homosexual army flamboyantly defending a citizenry suckling at the foul teat of government welfare? The choice is yours, fair maiden America, for the name of this feudal system is Democracy. –Stephen Colbert, in The Daily Show

Say what you will about fascism, Jon, but at least then you knew when the fake election was. –Ed Helms, in The Daily Show, re: the 2000 election

What kind of madman refuses to produce evidence that he doesn’t have, that he said he didn’t? Saddam had to be taken out or who knows what else he might not have done. –Stephen Colbert, in The Daily Show

As a journalist I have to maintain my objectivity, but I would say the feeling down here was one of a pervasive and palpable evil. A thick demonic stench that rolls over you and clings like hot black tar, a nightmare from which you cannot awaken, a nameless fear that lives in the dark spaces beyond your peripheral vision and drives you toward inhuman cruelties and unspeakable perversions. The delegates’ bloated, pustulent bodies twisting from one obscene form to another, giant spider-shaped and ravenous wolf-headed creatures who feast upon the flesh of the innocent and suck the marrow from the bones of the poor. –Stephen Colbert, in the The Daily Show, re: the Republican convention

George W. Bush: I think we’re welcomed in Iraq.
Jon Stewart: Apparently the rocket-propelled grenade is the Iraqi equivalent of “aloha.”
–in The Daily Show

Okay, looks like this is gonna be a while, so if you’re playing at home, remember, it’s a shot of tequila every time he says “Terrorist,” “Danger,” or “Madman.” –Jon Stewart, in The Daily Show, after President Bush describes terrorists several times

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman. –Margaret Thatcher

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. –HL Mencken

The ballot is stronger than the bullet. –Abraham Lincoln, in a speech in Bloomington, IL, on May 29, 1856

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. –Clarence Darrow, quoted in Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense

No government can long be secure without a formidable opposition. –Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed. –Mao Tse-tung

… acting is not a profession from which I would want my governments to originate. –John Simon, on Ronald Reagan

Government is so tedious that sometimes you wonder if the government isn’t being boring on purpose. –PJ O’Rourke

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us. –Leo Tolstoy

It is perfectly true that the government is best which governs least. It is equally true that the government is best which provides most. –Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one. –Henry Miller, quoted in George Plimpton’s Writers at Work, Second Series

Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office. –David Broder

Being in politics is like being a football coach; you have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important. –Eugene McCarthy

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. –John Kenneth Galbraith, in a letter to President Kennedy, March 2, 1962

The Conservative Party is an organized hypocrisy. –Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech to the House of Commons

The Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see his way to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking. –Will Rogers

The Republicans have a habit of having three bad years and one good one, and the good one always happens to be election year. –ditto

... the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change. –Seth MacFarlane, in Family Guy

Oh my God! The dead have risen and are voting Republican! –Bart Simpson, in The Simpsons

[The Democrats are] the kind of people who’d stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire...The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn’t bother to stop because they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the Country Club. –Dave Barry

When you looked at the Republicans you saw the scum off the top of business. When you looked at the Democrats you saw the scum off the top of politics. Personally, I prefer business. A businessman will steal from you directly instead of getting the IRS to do it for him. And when the Republicans ruin the environment, destroy the supply of affordable housing, and wreck the industrial infrastructure, at least they make a buck off it. The Democrats just do these things for fun. –PJ O’Rourke [sometimes I’m glad I’m an Independent!]

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. –Mark Twain, quoted in Albert B. Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. –George Wills

fuck the conservatives.
fuck the moderates.
fuck the liberals.
be your own person.
–Nacra, seen on ISCA BBS

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear. –Alan Coren

Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. –Jawaharlal Nehru

This isn’t democracy. This is shit-ocracy. –someone talking about Russian government, seen on ISCA BBS

All language is a longing for home. –Coleman Banks, in the introduction to Chapter 3 of The Essential Rumi

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
–Rumi, “A Community of the Spirit”

A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language.
–Rumi, an untitled piece in Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi

If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity. –Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

Go to where the silence is and say something. –Amy Goodman, upon accepting an award for coverage of the 1991 massacre of Timorese by Indonesian troops

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. –Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, December 11, 1986

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. –George Eliot, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...Tooting, howling, sreeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a grey vegetation. –Jean Arp, On My Way

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. –Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again. –George Seferis

Thanks to language, we have a verbal memory that allows us to learn and remember without physically experiencing something. Pure magic. –Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind

Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don’t share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don’t think so. It robs us of life’s many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. –ditto

When the blood drains out of language, one’s experience of life weakens and grows pale. –ditto

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. –Oliver Wendell Holmes

Utopia would be if everyone suddenly held their tongues and allowed a blessed silence to fall upon the earth. –James Hamilton-Paterson, Amazing Disgrace

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. –George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

Trees, flowers, grass grow in silence. See the stars, moon, and sun, how they move in silence. –Mother Theresa, For the Brotherhood of Man

Only silence is great; all else is weakness. –Alfred de Vigny, La Mort du Loup

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words. –Elbert Hubbard

Silence is of various depths and fertility, like soil. –Henry David Thoreau, journal, January 21, 1853

This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A Great Silence overcomes me, and I wonder why I ever thought to use language. –Rumi

All the masters tell us that the reality of life—which our noisy waking consciousness prevents us from hearing—speaks to us chiefly in silence. –Karlfried Graf Durckheim

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew.
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.
–May Sarton

And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying all we did not know. –William Rose Benet

… she’d never known silence could be so cruel a weapon, never known she could inflict such pain just by sitting still and silent. She liked the feeling. –Robert Rodi, Fag Hag

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak out one day it will just up and punch you inside the mouth from the inside.” –Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from. –Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. –Mark Twain

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. –George Orwell

There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that comes from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. –Deepak Chopra

I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain. –Jane Wagner, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe

In her starry shade of dim and solitary loveliness, I learn the language of another world. –Lord Byron

Say what you will, but you might die if they listen. –Toad the Wet Sprocket, “Chile”

The English language has far more lives than a cat. People have been murdering it for years. –Farmer’s Almanac

Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise. –Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Learning the art of loafing is absolutely essential for creativity, productivity, and peace of mind. –Guy Claxton, quoted in Real Simple, November 2005

...for every minute you spend in the gym, you add a minute to your life. It sounds like a pretty good deal. But, I hasten to add, only if your current life is pretty sad.
See, the problem is, that minute you spend exercising is a minute you are taking from now and tacking it onto the part of life later one might call hell—that last decade of life where you’re peeing into a bag and mistaking your children for spiders. The fact is, it’s far better to be careful with your minutes while you’re in the blossom of youth—when you’re still able to pull drunk secretaries at the pub and sneak dope onto an airplane. The tradeoff between “now” to “later” is wholly unnecessary and wrong—you won’t want that extra time when it’s spent straddling a bed pan, straining after every nugget of undigested bran. No—as the world moves on, you’ll be praying for a quick death, one denied to you by your former self—the guy pumping relentlessly up and down on a stair climber. –Greg Gutfeld, “Diary of an Underachiever”

... in the end, the gym is more important than anything else on the planet. It has one simple role: it reminds you how great everything else is in the world. If you’re bored by your job, or your girlfriend, or your local pub—then go to the gym. Work out for an hour, and you’ll suddenly miss everything beyond the gym’s front doors. –ditto

Alas! The hours we waste in work
And similar inconsequence,
Friends, I beg you do not shirk
Your daily task of indolence.
–Don Marquis, The Almost Perfect State

There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it. –John W. Raper

I have so often asked myself whether the days on which we are compelled to be idle aren’t the very ones we spend in the deepest activity? Whether our actions themselves, when they come later, are not merely the last afterring of a great movement that takes place in us on inactive days? –Rainer Maria Rilke

“Don’t just do something,” Buddha said, “stand there!” –Daniel Berrigan

Here’s how sloth is necessary: While some of us can get through a twenty-four-hour day without feeling greedy or angry or envious or lustful, only speed freaks can get through twenty-four hours without a little downtime. Human beings need sleep; we also need to stare off into space, look out the window, daydream, pick our noses, surf the Net, and spend some time every day being indolent and useless. When we work too much and sloth too little, humans get physically sick. By contrast, no one ever got sick from too little envy or too little greed.
Sloth is desirable because it’s scarce, as scarcity creates desire. –Dan Savage, Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America

As long as I don’t have to get up in the morning and do a proper job, I’m happy. –Joe Pasquale, in a heat magazine interview

I don’t even walk the dogs. I’m really a lazy person. I’m not motivated to work out at all. ... I think exercise is bad for you. –Sharon Osbourne

I’ve defined the ability to do things half-ass. I’ve never been a hard worker. I’ve relied more on my ability to get things done at the last minute and on the potential to do well and others’ expectations that I can do well than actually delivering a product. I’ve always anticipated doing good things, it’s just a matter of other things getting in the way. –Marlene, in Facing 30: Women Talk about Constructing a Real Life and Other Scary Rites of Passage

I want to be fit, but I don’t want being fit to be all I think about. I begin to consider that maybe being fat and interesting is better than being thin and obsessed with staying that way. –Allison Glock, “I Want My Body Back”

I get my exercise serving as a pallbearer to my friends who take exercise. –Chauncey Depew, quoted in the LA Times, May 4, 1954

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away. –Paul Terry, quoted in Reader’s Digest, January 1938

Once, not needing to exercise in order to survive was a privilege and the hallmark of gentlefolk, who were identified by their soft white hands and merely vestigial muscles. Well-rested, heartily fed, and flushed with excellent port, many of these sluggards lived to an overripe old age, annoying their heirs, while for those who exercised all day life was nasty, brutish, and mercifully short. We have failed to profit by their example. We, as a nation, embraced voluntary, nonessential exercise. –Barbara Holland, Endangered Pleasures

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired. –Jules Renard

I like the word “indolence.” It makes my laziness seem classy. –Bern Williams

If it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all. –Joey Adams

I really don’t think I need buns of steel. I’d be happy with buns of cinnamon. –Ellen DeGeneres

Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it; if you are sick, you shouldn’t take it. –Henry Ford

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises. –Neil Armstrong

It’s unnatural for people to run around city streets unless they are thieves or victims. It makes people nervous to see someone running. I know that when I see someone running on my street, my instincts tell me to let the dog out after him. –Mike Royko

If I didn’t run from my fears, I wouldn’t get any exercise at all, now would I? –Drew Carey

Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well. –Mark Twain, More Maxims of Mark

Intense, obsessive interest in health, nutrition, and exercise arouses my suspicions. I distrust anybody who worries too much about such things. –Florence King

In just a decade or so, idleness … has become a social sin and slightly disgusting, like eating whipped cream with your fingers. –Barbara Holland, Endangered Pleasures

From the mid-sixties through most of the seventies it was widely believed that…Leisure was better for the soul, and the soul was important. This notion suffered a total reversal in the eighties, and now our small available free time should be spent in the most strenuous possible activity, because this means we’re not doing nothing. –ditto

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all. –James Thurber, Fables for our Time

When I was a child what I wanted to be when I grew up was an invalid. –Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

… I don’t like much movement at all. If talking were aerobic, I’d be the thinnest person in the world. –Carrie Fisher

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. –Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. ... without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. –ditto

I make no bones of it, but here confess and set down that I am lazy. I was born lazy and it has grown on me. I would never move at all if it did not hurt so to remain in one position. The only reason I take exercise is in order to relax afterward. Furthermore, I raise my voice in defense of the army of the lazy ones. They are the salt of the earth. A lazy person does better work than an industrious body. He puts a fiery energy into his task because he wants to finish it as soon as possible. A lazy boy will saw wood fast so that he can get through and rest. A lazy girl sweeps the room with whirlwind activity, while the girl who loves work will fiddle about all morning. It is laziness that is the spring of human progress. Because a lazy man wanted to get out of the job of currying the horse, he thought out a plan for putting a bucket of gasoline under the buggy seat, whereby we ride like the wind. Because lazy folks hated to climb stairs, elevators were invented. Because people were too lazy to get off the train and go to the lunch counter, they devised dining cars; and being too lazy to ride on the railway all night sitting up, they contrived sleeping cars. Being too lazy to dip his pen in the ink every few seconds, some genius invented the fountain pen. And being too lazy even to use that, he proceeded to build a typewriter. Also too lazy to run the typewriter himself, he started the fashion of having girl typists. It was a lazy genius that thought of making a patent cigar lighter out of a flint stone and benzine, because he was too tired to strike matches. Likewise, who would have conceived the idea of a fireless cooker except some woman too lazy to stand over the cook stove? If everybody was an earnest and toiling little Willie that just ate up work and loved to employ every moment in useful energy, we should lapse into barbarism. –(?), “In Praise of Laziness”

Being around sports enthusiasts makes me want to push an amendment through Congress banning all professional sports from our culture. –Paul Feig, Kick Me

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury. –Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life

I hate sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. –HL Mencken

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting. –George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit”

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
–Hafiz, “Absolutely Clear”
_____________________________

Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband’s newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed, is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room. –Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry. –Anton Chekhov, quoted in Roger Hall’s Conjugal Rites

Sometimes I wonder if someone will ever come for me, if there will ever be a boy—a man—for me to open to. I wonder if I will always be like this, alone, always forced to content myself with myself, my own hand tucked between my legs so that my body makes a kind of circle, a zero, enclosing the clean emptiness of nothingness, a mobius strip or an ouroboros, a serpent swallowing its own tail. I am a closed system, and I yearn, I ache, I hanker for someone to claim what I long to give. –Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins. –Rainer Maria Rilke

Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat. –Joyce Carol Oates, “Ugly”

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. –Dag Hammarskjöld, Diaries

... I was lonely to the point of wanting extinction. –Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven

DO NOT SUFFER FROM LONELINESS. Go outside. Go away. It’s all the people making you lonely. Pick a spot on the horizon and head straight for it. Weave your way through a stand of redwoods. Kayak an island chain. Peer over your toes at the edge of a canyon. Go to your favorite place. Again, and again. This is what you need to do. Not just because it fuels your independence. But because it reminds you you’re a part of something bigger. And although it may not occur to the baffled onlookers who can’t take their eyes off your smiling mud-covered wired-up insane self, it will occur to you: You aren’t the one who’s lonely. –from a Nike ad

There’s nothing worse then being surrounded by people and feeling like you’re all alone. –(?)

It’s a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle of a crowd. –Marilyn Monroe

Loneliness is dangerous … because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self. –Joyce Carol Oates, “Shame”

Loneliness is the clearest of crystal insight into your own soul; it’s the fear of one’s own self that haunts the lonely. –Keith Haynie

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. –Kurt Vonnegut

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody—I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. –Mother Theresa

This loneliness is just an exile from God. –Anne Sexton, “Letters to Dr. Y”

He felt something else, too, something dark and devastating. Something far more disturbing than anger, far more debilitating than fear, something uglier, like a terrible loneliness, but much worse than loneliness. –Dean Koontz, The Voice of the Night

There is an excruciating loneliness in waiting out the hours till morning, again and again and again. Time moves more slowly, and the fact that everyone else is at rest makes me feel so separate, so alone. I long to recover what comes so easily to everyone else. –Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

What fresh hell is this? –Dorothy Parker’s habitual response upon hearing the doorbell or telephone ring

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. –CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven…was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind. –Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

Hell is when there is no reason to live and no courage to die. –William Markiewicz

What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet’s desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light. –Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Midnight Elegy”

What is hell?
Hell is oneself;
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
–TS Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”

Sometimes hell has no words. –Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

Hell, madame, is to love no longer. –Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

When I think of the number of disagreeable people that I know who have gone to a better world, I am sure hell won’t be so bad after all. –Mark Twain

Wherever I was, I was happy…I think I was in heaven, and now I’m not. I was torn out of there, pulled out by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch—this is hell. – Sarah Michelle Gellar, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I hear
My ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
As if my hand were at its throat
I myself am hell;
Nobody’s here—
–Robert Lowell, “Skunk Horn”

In the garish glaring picture book sun of that small town, I was carefully constructing my own private hell. –Marya Hornbacher, Wasted

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists—that is why they invented hell. –Bertrand Russell

... even the never-ending monotony of housework can remind us that we have found our heart’s desire, that there is beauty and romance in the most repetitious of household chores. –Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez, Love Poems for Real Life

My all-time favorite place has to be at home, in my lounge when I’m alone. I just love lying on my sofa with my eyes closed, feeling half asleep, almost daydreaming! I think maybe the most perfect place on Earth is being on your own, in your lounge or bedroom with a book. –Björk

When I was at home, I was in a better place. –William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest. –Thomas Moore

When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonored both ... Our god is a house-hold god, as well as a heavenly one; he has an altar in every man’s dwelling. –John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. –ditto

[Home:] It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, my soul rests. –May Sarton

Everyone should live in the place where they want to be. –Ikuo Oshima, quoted in Greta Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven

Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark. –Stephen King, It

Louisa had almost the enthusiasm of an artist over the mere order and cleanliness of her solitary home. –Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Listen to me
I am finally going home
to double over and be sick
on my own ground
to weep my guts out
in my own back yard…
I am still together
heading home
but not sure how…
I am heading homeward
let me go.
The heart grows tired,
timid and afraid sometimes.
It needs to rest
as much as any head
on aching shoulders.
–Rod McKuen, Alone

I am never sure what I miss by staying home. Doubtlessly, I’ve avoided disappointments that might have chipped away a little more of my self-confidence. Possibly on one given night I missed the silver apple that, bitten into, would have changed my life. – Rod McKuen, Alone

You must not let terror overtake you.
It is a bone breaking in the middle of the night.
It is a misspelled word.
It is everything you thought you knew
becoming unknown, the leaves
stripped from the tree,
all the greenness orange and dry,
it is a pain past bearable, you must not.
–Susan Griffin, “Prayer for Continuation”

Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
the things that you love, name
their names, prepare
to lose them. It will be
as if all you know were turned
around within your body.
–Wendell Berry, “Song in a Year of Catastrophe”

Astonishing the way the world can tilt on its axis and yet people continue to walk upright, to go about their days, eating their dinners in restaurants, making their plans. –Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad

A strange thought: I would not want this not to have happened. Because if I escape I shall be a completely different and I think better person. Because if I don’t escape, if something dreadful happened, I shall still know that the person I was and would have stayed if this hadn’t happened was not the person I now want to be.
It’s like firing a pot. You have to risk the cracking and the warping. –John Fowles, The Collector

What is a highway to one is a disaster to the other. –Rumi, “The Food Sack”

In times of crisis, the heart either breaks or boldens. – Honoré de Balzac, La Recherche de l’absolu

Before I found out for myself, I might have imagined that in the aftermath of personal apocalypse, the little bothers of life would effectively vanish. But it’s not true. You still feel chills, you still despair when a package is lost in the mail, and you still feel irked to discover you were shortchanged at Starbucks. –Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin

And I realize this experience is as common as dirt: Your husband, your wife, your child is late, terribly late, and then they come home after all; there’s an explanation. For the most part, these brushes against a parallel universe in which they never do come home—for which there is an explanation, but one that will divide your whole life into before and after—vanish without a trace. The hours that had elongated into lifetimes suddenly collapse like a fan. –ditto

I’ve learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covert suffering like a designer jacket. I’d readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away. –ditto

... tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. ...it was as if some folks…got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid, instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people’s outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger’s ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man’s fresh divorce and that woman’s terminal throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody’s hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste. –ditto

I cannot at once contain the suffering of so many family dinners with one empty chair. I haven’t anguished that the photo on the piano is forever tainted because that was the snapshot given to the newspapers or because sibling portraits on either side continue to mark occasions of greater maturity—college graduations, weddings—while the static high school yearbook photo loses color in the sun. I haven’t been privy to the month-by-month deterioration of marriages once robust; I haven’t sniffed the sickly sweet waft of gin off the breath of a formerly industrious realtor at advancingly earlier hours of the afternoon. I haven’t felt the weight of all those cartons dragged into a van after a neighborhood lush with oaks, bubbling with smooth-rocked creeks, and alive with the laughter of other people’s healthy children has suddenly become intolerable overnight. –ditto

I felt as though my whole life before had been only a bland dream, and I had just now awakened—to the scream that had been beneath me all along, a subterranean current of horror running under every day. –Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

You think it’s a day like any other. What you don’t realize is anything can happen. And then it does. It happens. And there’s so much left unsaid. And it was all just wasted time. –Harriet Sansom Harris, in Six Feet Under

I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren’t looking; your husband could lose his job; your baby could get sick or die. I could have said that nothing is safe, that the surface of the world is pretty and sane, but underneath it’s all fault lines and earthquakes waiting to happen. –Jennifer Weiner, Little Earthquakes

What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid. –George Stewart, Earth Abides

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. –Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple

Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So, what are we, helpless? Puppets? Nah. The big moments are gonna come, you can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are. –Max Perlich, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me, and they were always unplanned. –Meera Syal, Anita and Me

And I do worry about the future … because we all suffer in life; we all go through terrible tragedies; we all face things that seem unbearable. –Helena, quoted in Jane Wegscheider Hyman’s Women Living with Self-Injury

But everything went wrong for me and upside down, the nature of things was reborn for me. –Vinsentsos Kornaros, Erotokritos

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped. –Samuel Johnson

… and the first time you’re broken, you don’t know
you’ll be healed again, better than before.
–Sharon Olds, “New Mother”

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are. –Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained. –ditto

… horror really can’t be talked about because it’s alive, because it’s mute and goes on growing: memory-wounding pain drips by day drips in sleep. –George Seferis, “Last Stop”

Sometimes imagination reworks or redefines horror by explaining it as necessary and bearable. –Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind

In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m. when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. –Graham Greene, The Quiet American

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

First of all, traumas, present-life or past-life, CAN end up devitalizing us, depressing us, crushing our self-esteem, making us feel “different,” alienated, unfit, distrustful, unsure, withdrawn, socially “flat” or unconnectable, emotionally exhausted, worn out, fragile, etc., etc., etc. By draining our energy and vitality, and putting up blocks between ourselves and other people, suffocating us inside our own shells, or turning us into porcupines who inadvertently wound others every step we take, these traumas may undermine many of the emotional and social tools we need to successfully participate in the modern economic world. It goes without saying that successfully working through these traumatic issues should, in cases, be able to produce major economic benefits, as part of the overall liberation and blossoming of our lives. –from one of my listservs

Hope—not a singing bird or a gushing spring, as poets would have it, but a man with a whip, driving you on. –Kathy Page, The Story of My Face

And yet, hope pursues me; encircles me, bites me; like a dying wolf tightening his grip for the last time. –Federico Garcia Lorca, Doña Rosita

… we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love, and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it’s not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can’t long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart. –Dean Koontz, Seize the Night

In reasonable measure, hope sustains us. In great excess, it distorts perceptions, dulls the mind, corrupts the heart to no less an extent than does heroin. –ditto

We move from terror and loss to unexpected good fortune and out of darkness hope is born. –Claire Danes, in My So-Called Life

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man. –Friedrich Nietzsche

Funny, how hope raises its lovely head when least expected, a flower in a wasteland. –Dean Koontz, False Memory

This was a period of hope, true, but we harbor the illusion that times of hope are devoid of tensions and conflicts when, in my experience, they are the most dangerous. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power—the ones who had taken it away—become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive. In many ways these times of hope, of greater leniency, were as disquieting as before. –Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

He that lives upon hope will die fasting. –Benjamin Franklin, preface to Poor Richard’s Almanac

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery. –Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

Hope deceives more than cunning can. –Marquis Vauvenargues, Reflections et maxims

There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope. –Bern Williams

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes, regardless of how it turns out. –Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Hope is like the sun, which, as I journey toward it, is bound to give me cancer. –Dan Goodman, Meditations for Miserable People Who Want to Stay that Way

And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing, nothing at all. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture postcard which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tender-hearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman, or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea … –ditto

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. –John Updike, A Month of Sundays

I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. –James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

The real death of the United States will come when everyone is just alike. –Ralph Ellison, in an interview in That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure, December 1961

America’s not Disneyland and we can’t deny it any longer. Things smell, things have edges, people can get hurt. –Eric Fischl (this appeared in a 2008 installation of his art at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum)

The new Airbus plane, the A380, is capable of holding 800 passengers. Or 400 Americans. –Jon Stewart, in The Daily Show

Food in the States—the portions are ridiculous. We have a healthy appetite, but bloody hell! –Nick McCarthy

Breakfast is always a good thing in the States. There’s just too much; no wonder they’re so fucking fat! –Nick Atkinson

The food portions in New York make London look like a third world country. –overheard on the London Underground (courtesy of The Man Who Fell Asleep)

It’s always a little bit strange in America. It’s a place filled with so much beauty, but underneath it all there’s always an undercurrent of violence. –Albert Watson, in Dazed and Confused magazine, September 2007

America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Traveling across the United States, it’s easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there’s a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING WALKWAY IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don’t run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence. Place bronze statues under the southern California sun, and of course they’re going to get hot. Cannons are supposed to be loud, that’s their clame to fame, and—like it or not—the moving sidewalk is bound to end sooner or later. It’s hard trying to explain a country whose motto has become You can’t claim I didn’t warn you. –David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier. –Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

My leery outlook on the United States was precious to me—even if, thanks to you, I had learned to give the country grudging credit for at least being a spirited, improvisational sort of place that, despite its veneer of conformity, cultivated an impressive profusion of outright lunatics. –Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin

People around here can’t just go for a walk, they have to be getting with some kind of program. And you know, this may be at the heart of it, what’s my beef. All those intangibles of life, the really good but really elusive stuff that makes life worth living—Americans seem to believe they can all be obtained by joining a group, or signing up to a subscription, or going on a special diet, or undergoing aromatherapy. It’s not just that Americans think they can buy everything; they think that if you follow the instructions on the label, the product has to work. Then when the product doesn’t work and they’re still unhappy even though the right to happiness in enshrined in the Constitution, they sue the bejesus out of each other. –ditto

Americans are fat, inarticulate, and ignorant. They’re demanding, imperious, and spoiled. They’re self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they’ve got it right—never mind that half the adult population doesn’t vote. And they’re boastful, too. Believe it or not, in Europe it isn’t considered acceptable to foist on new acquaintances right off the bat that you went to Harvard and you own a big house and what it cost and which celebrities come to dinner. And Americans never pick up, either, that in some places it’s considered crass to share your taste for anal sex with someone at a cocktail party you’ve known for five minutes—since the whole concept of privacy here has fallen by the wayside. That’s because Americans are trusting to a fault, innocent in a way that makes them stupid. Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can’t stand them. –ditto

One of the things I can’t stand about this country is lack of accountability. Everything Americans do that doesn’t work out too great has to be somebody else’s fault. –ditto

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum. –Sinclair Lewis, America and Cosmic Man

The happy ending is our national belief. –Mary McCarthy, “America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub”

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. –Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans”

There are only two great diseases in the world today—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul. –DH Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent

There are two Americas—one for the powerful and the privileged and one for everybody else. –John Edwards, in the Baltimore Sun, January 9, 2004

America makes prodigious mistakes,
America has colossal faults, but one thing
cannot be denied: America is always on the
move. She may be going to Hell, of course,
but at least she isn’t standing still.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. –Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (regarding the 2000 election debacle)

She resented her former belief that their lives in America had been secure. Someone had lied to them as shamelessly as a spouse. All over the planet people wanted to kill Americans; here too nutjobs acquired automatic weapons, deadly bacteria and viruses, nuclear material and explosive fertilizer. How could she have brought her kids into this world, a world even more sinister than her marriage? Their future was chilled by a lethal, indelible shadow. –Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

Americans just aren’t curious. This is especially true of young people. We drove sixteen thousand kilometers on American roads, and almost every day we took into the automobile fellow travelers who were waiting for a break on the side of the road. More often than not, they were young men looking for work. They talked about themselves gladly, even with pleasure. And not a single one of them ever asked who we were, where we were going, or what language we were speaking with each other. Don’t think that this was the result of excessive delicacy. Quite the contrary—Americans are even a little rude. They simply weren’t interested. –Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip

The average American, notwithstanding his apparent energetic activity, is actually very passive by nature. You have to give everything to him pre-cooked. Tell him which drink is better, and he’ll drink it. Tell him which political party is more in his interest, and he’ll vote for it. Tell him which God is the “real” one, and he’ll believe in him. But whatever else you do, don’t force him to think. He doesn’t like to and is not very good at it. And so that he’ll believe your words, you have to repeat them as often as possible. All American advertising is built that way, both commercial and political, all of it. –ditto

America is an improbable idea. A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone. “Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image,” the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote. That’s because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one. That is the ideal.
The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murders of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to “crown thy good with brotherhood,” that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful. –Anna Quindlen, “A Quilt of a Country”

I don’t think my country is a shithole. Indeed, I agree with [Pat] Buchanan that America is the “last best hope of earth,” and, like [William] Bennett, I believe the United States is worth fighting for—these United States—not some 1950s era dream of the United States. The country worth fighting for is the big, messy, complicated, diverse, fascinating place the United States is right now. What makes the United States the envy of the world (besides Hooters and Krispy Kremes, of course) is that this is a nation where full citizenship has nothing to do with race, religion, sex, political persuasion or, yes, personal virtue. Good or bad, religious or irreligious, male or female, left or right, of color or washed out—we’re all Americans.
This is a country where the culture evolves and remains vibrant because people are free to challenge the existing order. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to some of our fellow citizens. America is at its best when our freedom to go our own way is restricted only when, as Thomas Jefferson said, “[our] acts are injurious to others.” –Dan Savage, Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America

Americans. Have they reached the top of the evolutionary ladder? Doesn’t matter what you’ve done, how big the problem is—it all vanishes into thin air if you can confess it on TV. –Hallgrímur Helgason, 101 Reykjavík

So much of what Americans live with is an economic landscape—malls, stores, and movie theaters, ski slopes and theme parks—in which one’s relationship to place has to do with boredom, undisciplined need, and envy. The Arctic’s natural austerity is richness enough, its physical clarity a form of voluptuousness. Who needs anything more? –Gretel Ehrlich, “Cold Comfort: Looking for the Sun in Greenland’s Endless Night”

The capacity for American self-delusion, especially when it comes to food, is bottomless. –Steve Almond

In our own time, we are fortunate to have an abundance of truly remarkable poets, although we as Americans seem to be the last on earth to acknowledge this gift. –Sam Hamill, preface to The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing

Shut up, you American! You Americans, all you do is talk, and talk, and say “Let me tell you something” and “I just wanna say.” Well, you’re dead now, so shut up! –the Grim Reaper, in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When the American people get through with the English language, it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy. –Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley at His Best

Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. –Oscar Wilde

When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanized. –Andre Maurois

Their ... demeanour is invariably morose, sullen, clownish, and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humour, vivacity, or the capacity of enjoyment. –Charles Dickens, on Americans

There won’t be any revolution in America ... the people are too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom. –Eric Linklater, Juan in America

The American male doesn’t mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities. –Wilfred Sheed, Office Politics

I wish that, rather than merely retreating into flag-waving and flag-wearing, Americans would also steel themselves spiritually for sacrifice, heightened self-discipline. –Francine du Plessix Gray, on post 9/11 life

Murder is the American moral equivalent of enlightenment. The ultimate expression of the self. –Richard Kadrey, “Fire Catcher”

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. –Mary Ellen Kelly

Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic. –Dan Rather

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels—men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. –Dwight Eisenhower, in a speech at Columbia University, May 31, 1954

America, I do not invoke your name in vain.
When I hold the sword to my heart,
when I endure the leaks in my soul,
when your new day
penetrates me through the windows,
I’m of and I’m in the light that produces me,
I live in the shade that determines me,
I sleep and rise in your essential dawn,
sweet as grapes and terrible,
conductor of sugar and punishment,
soaked in the sperm of your species,
nursed on the blood of your legacy.
–Pablo Neruda, “America, I Do Not Invoke Your Name in Vain”

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says America is for him a maximum security prison whose walls

Are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials;

And as I contemplate how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America.

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
Or whether he is just spin-doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and, this is the funny part,

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phoney ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
when I should have been listening to the cries of the future”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
–Tony Hoagland, “America”

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, a killer. –DH Lawrence, “Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels,” in Studies in Classic American Literature

Of nothing [in the US] are you allowed to get the real odor or savor. Everything is sterilized and wrapped in cellophane. –Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men. –Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American. –(?)

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. –John O’Hara

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. –Georges Clemenceau

America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. –Hunter S. Thompson

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences. –George Santayana

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history. –Joseph Conrad

You can be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination. –Charles de Gaulle

We have got to make of this country a great beautiful civilization or we will be the shortest one in history because our scientific advantages have been so exaggerated; they have so far outrun our spiritual interpretations and so far gone ahead of everything that we know or feel within ourselves that we don’t know where we are. –Frank Lloyd Wright

A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it. –ditto

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian businessman. –HL Mencken

A fundamental difference between the US and Britain is in Britain, no one will talk unless he has a reason and in America, no one will stop talking unless he has a reason. –Clive James

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. –Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. –Frank Zappa

America’s one of the finest countries anyone ever stole. –Bobcat Goldthwaite

[America:] It’s a fascist, imperialist, racist shithole. –Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you’d find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.–Dave Barry

What the American public doesn’t know is exactly what makes them the American public. –(?)

[Sir Thomas Burdon] They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris. ...
[Lady Agatha] Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die? ...
[Lord Henry] They go to America.
–Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development. –Russell Baker

Life in late twentieth-century America is just so fucking funny to begin with, so disjointed, so bizarre, so alienating, that there’s nothing left to make fun of. –Cathy Crimmins

Uncle Sam has no conscience. They don’t know what morals are. They don’t try and eliminate an evil because it’s evil, or because it’s immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence. –Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks

The United States is big and stupid and full of prairies. –Stacey Dash, in Clueless

Garlic had saved her. In a way it had saved me too, confirming my position as an outsider and preventing me from absorbing easily any unquestioning assumptions of national superiority, so prevalent, so grotesque a phenomenon in our country, made up as it was and is, in large part, of transportees, captives, and immigrants. –Paula Fox, The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in hell. –Philip Sheridan

To their grand memory is the bland,
jagged skyline of Scranton,
appropriately. And these mornings.
No shiny monuments could do.
–Thomas Kielty Blomain, “Morning, Years After the Mining”

For all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it [the South] is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. –HL Mencken

You know death was always around Suffolk, always around. It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets. –Ruth McBride Jordan, in James McBride’s The Color of Water

If a day goes by and I haven’t been slain, I’m happy. –Carol Leifer, on New York

New York: the only city where people make radio requests like “This is for Tina—I’m sorry I stabbed you.” –ditto

New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test-tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.
When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the bread lines, the opium joints that are built like palaces…the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves…A whole city erected over a hallow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And Forty-Second Street! The top of the world, they call it. Where’s the bottom then? You can walk along with your hand out and they’ll put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor, they walk along with head thrown back and they almost break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons. They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray their empty faces with flecks of ecstasy. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. –EB White, Here Is New York (NB: Although it sounds like he was discussing 9/11, this was actually written in 1949.)

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation...of all targets, New York has a certain clear pirority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm. –ditto

By then I had come to know New York well, the way you know a city where you’ve had jobs—most of them pretty awful—that keep you more or less fed and out of the weather. No matter what my circumstances were, I always found the city hard to live in. But there were moments of vividness and promise, even of glamour. It is startling to recollect them. –Paula Fox, The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff. –Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife

Official Washington, unlike New York, does not value artistic insight or style, traits which might allow for a certain creative moodiness. It values power, and for the legions of players who populate its corridor—lawyers, lobbyists, Capitol Hill staffers, and journalists—power is created by the assiduous, daily application of smarts. It has little interest in, or tolerance for, mental frailty. –Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression

There is something wrong with Washington, DC. For all the time I’ve spent there, I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what it is—there are the obvious things, of course, the palpable greed, the thrum of excessive power, the unbelievable racism, the city itself a total political and social shambles. But beyond these there is something wrong with Washington, DC. There is a tight-faced look, a haggard and driven look that people wear as they race down the streets, shoving past one another on the subway, bashing one another in the back of the knees with leather briefcases as they push and jostle their way up escalators, into cabs, in restaurants. I have since wondered if there is something about the city itself that clicks with people like me, fosters the hunger for power and success to such a degree that the people themselves become hollow, sucked dry of simple humanity. But maybe I’m just imagining things. –Marya Hornbacher, Wasted

I…ran from the campus to the Tenleytown Metro station, ducked into the subway, ducked out, raced up the long escalator, excuseme excuseme, elbowing and shouldering my way past a bunch of suits. I was just another woman in a suit and running shoes, and I popped up like a gopher in Dupont Circle. We all went zipping down the streets, our separate and anonymous ways, squinting in the sudden light, past the flower vendors, the fruit vendors, the hot dog and pretzel stands, past the cafes and the shops and the small circular park where men slept on benches with newspapers over their faces, past the men asleep on the grates in the sidewalk where steam rose like a belch from the belly of the city, past the women with signs and tin cups, crouched up against buildings, below eye level. Everyone was gauging the distance between here and there, avoiding eye contact, swinging briefcases in sharp arcs, clutching purses to hips, walking that walk. –ditto

Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt
This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water
This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms
This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms
This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy
This is the cemetery of the poor
who died for democracy      This is a battlefield
from a nineteenth-century war      the shrine is famous
This is the sea-town of myth and story      when the fishing fleets
went bankrupt      here is where the jobs were      on the pier
processing frozen fishsticks      hourly wages and no shares
These are other battlefields      Centralia      Detroit
here are the forests primeval      the copper      the silver lodes
These are the suburbs of acquiescence      silence rising fumelike
          from the streets
This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires
flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling
whose children are drifting blind alleys pent
between coiled rolls of razor wire
I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural
then yes let it be      these are small distinctions
where do we see it from is the question
–Adrienne Rich, “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities. –James Baldwin, Nobody Knows my Name

In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I am homesick for a country. I have never been there. I shall never go there. But where the clouds remember me distinctly. –Hilde Domin

Greenland’s … continuously shifting planes of light are like knives thrown in a drawer. They are the layered instruments that carve life out of death into art and back into life. They teach me how to see. –Gretel Ehrlich, “Cold Comfort: Looking for the Sun in Greenland’s Endless Night”

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. –Paul Gallico, in the New York Times, January 14, 1962

London is a city built on the wreckage of itself ... It’s had more comebacks than The Evil Dead. It’s been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners just took a deep breath and put the kettle on. Then the whole thing burned down. Every last stick of it. I remember my mum took me to see the Monument to the Great Fire. London burned WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY is what the monument has written on it. People thought it was the end of the world. But the Londoners got up the next day and the world hadn’t ended so they rebuilt the city in three years stronger and taller. Even Hitler couldn’t finish us, though he set the whole East End on fire. Bethnal Green was like hell my grandma said. Just one endless sea of flames. But we got through it. We built on the rubble. We built tower blocks and the NHS and we kept on coming like zombies. –Chris Cleave, Incendiary

... for there is nothing in London that the Thames does not know... –HV Morton, “The Nights of London”

By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show. –Samuel Johnson

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. –William Shakespeare, Richard II

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors. –George Santayana, “Soliloquies in England”

A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. –George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable. –Mark Twain

The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity. –George Bernard Shaw

The chip. The British contribution to world cuisine. –Kevin Kline, in A Fish Called Wanda

The [Birmingham, England] Central Library looks like a place where books are incinerated, not kept. –Prince of Wales

It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth. The most wretched, miserable, servile pathetic trash that was ever shat on civilisation. Some people hate the English. I don’t—they’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We’re ruled by effete assholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in … –Ewan MacGregor, in Trainspotting (it appears in Irvine Welsh’s book Trainspotting as “It’s nae good blamin’ it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We can’t even pick a decent vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by.”)

The great thing about Glasgow now is that if there is a nuclear attack it’d look exactly the same afterwards. –Billy Connolly

Do you use the telephone, do you watch television, do you drive on the road with tyres? There’s four things that have come out of this tiny, wee country. But it is also a country whose people are either capable of great or terrible things. A psychotic nation. –Robert Carlyle, speaking about Scotland in The Times, January 17, 1998

There have been many definitions of hell, but for the English the best definition is that it is a place where the Germans are the police, the Swedish are the comedians, the Italians are the defense force, Frenchmen dig the roads, the Belgians are the pop singers, the Spanish run the railways, the Turks cook the food, the Irish are the waiters, the Greeks run the government, and the common language is Dutch. –David Frost and Antony Jay, To England with Love

Italians always act without thinking, it’s the glory and the downfall of your civilization. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish … well, God knows. –Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible. –Charles Haughey, in the Daily Telegraph, July 14, 1988

The golden chill running down my spine—that’s Petersburg. The pale silver sky, the autumn gold of the spires, the wine-dark ancient water—the weight that pins down the corner of rude Peter’s airy pennant, lest it fly away. Since childhood … yes, that’s just how I’ve imagined Peter—as the heavy darkness of water under the bridge. Golden Petersburg! Yes, gold—not gray, not blue, not black, and not silver—gold! –Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House

[St. Petersburg:] Always the city had deeply moved those who saw it. To some it was oppressive, mystical, tragic; to others ethereal, magical, miraculous. To Lenin it was a sweated slum, ripe for agitation, intrigue, revolution. To the Romanovs it was the capital of the world, the seat of absolute authority, the mandate anointed by the blessing of the Orthodox faith.

Always the city evoked superlatives, swaying the beholder by the majesty of its spaces, the richeness of its planes, the interplay of water and stone, of granite piles and slender bridges, lowering skies and the endless cold and snow of winter. It was Russia’s workshop, Russia’s laboratory, the cradle of Russian scholarship and art. Here Mendeleyev discovered the periodic table of the elements. Here Pavlov worked with his dogs onconditioned reflexes. Here Mussorgsky wrote his wild, dark music, Pavlova’s fairy feet won the hearts of the grand dukes and the Imperial Ballet spawned Bakst, Diaghilev, Fokine, and Nijinsky. –Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

The thoughts Estonians have are often secret ones. They vanish like the tracks of fish in water. They leave behind words, but these no longer mean anything. –Mati Unt, Things in the Night

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity. –Marshall McLuhan

In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination. –Irving Layton, The Whole Blood Bird

When have you ever heard anyone say, “Honey, let’s stay in and order Canadian food”? –Kevin Pollack, in Canadian Bacon

Like maple syrup, Canada’s evil oozes over the United States. –the TV announcer, in Canadian Bacon

Think of your children pledging allegiance to the maple leaf. Mayonnaise on everything. Winter 11 months of the year. Anne Murray—all day, every day. –ditto

I do have to fine you. That will be a thousand dollars Canadian, or 10 American dollars if you prefer. –Dan Aykroyd, in Canadian Bacon

Genetic engineering lets us correct God’s horrible, horrible mistakes—like German people. –Mr. Garrison, in South Park

Everything ponderous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long-winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among Germans. –Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

German is the most extravagantly ugly language. It sounds like someone using a sick-bag on a 747. –William Rushton, Holiday Inn, Ghent

A verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it’s all together. It’s downright inhuman to split it up. But that’s just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between those two limits they just shovel in German. –Mark Twain, “Disappearance of Literature”

Actually, I don’t know anything about the Swiss themselves and I don’t give a shit. What I know about is their educational system, which was designed to destroy human beings and turn them into Swiss citizens. Switzerland is Germany without the random noise. –Luca Turin, quoted in Chandler Burr’s The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses

Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed! –Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis. –Brendan Behan, Richard’s Cork Leg

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. –Dwight D. Einsenhower, in his farewell radio and television address, January 17, 1961

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

The great question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of their mischiefs…has been, not whether be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. –John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts … perhaps the fear of a loss of power. –John Steinbeck

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel. –(?)

Intellect does not attain its full force until it attacks power. –Madame de Staël, “de la littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales”

A friend in power is a friend lost. –Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God: you shall not have both. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. –Stewart Udall, in a 1965 Dartmouth commencement speech

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. –John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, in a letter to Mandell Creighton

I believe in mystery, and frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate, and that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life only in a very primitive form. -Albert Einstein, in an interview with Peter A. Bucky

The happy do not believe in miracles. –Johann Wolfang von Göethe, Hermann und Dorothea

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles. –Johann Wolfang von Göethe, Spruche in Prosa

If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery which the world is filled with, even in its smallest things, could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letter #4

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. –Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious. That things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. –Carl Jung

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? –Jeannette Winterson

So, when all is said and done, I think Derek Walcott was right: One has to be willing to surrender to a condition of awe, to the astonishment of the soul, to bewilderment, bafflement, humility. Or, as Emerson neatly put it, “Let the bird sing without deciphering the song.” –Dennis Shekerjian

What is magic after all but an inspired and lovely fraudulence? –Frederic Prokosch

You see, one thing is, I can live without doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and pos