The Institute for Idiotic Pursuits
My name is Louis Albert. I am disabled (fluent aphasia) and use this Web Page to communicate with the world. The quotes and links give you insight to my thought processes. (I am told that I am a curmudgeon.)

This is a index of the authors of the quotations in my list.



Bereishith (Genesis)

"In the beginning, G-d Created the Heavens and the earth." [1:1]
"All the rest is commentary!"
Louis H. Albert
###
A heathen came to Rabbi Hillel and asked him to teach him the entire Torah (Bible) while he is standing on one foot.
"What is hateful to you, do not do to another.  That is the whole of the Law, all else is commentary."
Rabbi Hillel
called the Babylonian, ca. 60 BCE


"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
###
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
###
"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."
George Bernard Shaw
"A glass cat catches no mice."
Joe Denholm
"It is appallingly obvious our technology has exceeded our humanity."
###
"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."
###
"A mind once stretched by new thoughts can never regain its original shape."
###
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
###
Attention Deficit Disorder
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry..."
Albert Einstein


"What do you care what other people think?"
###
"So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science."
###
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."
Richard Feynman

"I don't care to belong to any social organization  which will accept me as a member."
###
"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."
###
"Women should be obscene and not heard."
 Groucho Marx 
"I don't mind coming to work -- I just don't want to stay when I get there."
Louis H. Albert
Deputy, Summit County Ohio


"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
###
"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzshe,
Epigram 156, Beyond Good and Evil


"The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion."
Stephen Jay Gould
while speaking to the United Negro College Fund, 5/9/89
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
has been added to Bracelet's Familiar Quotations'.
(reported in Esquire, 8/92) (reported in the NY Times, 12/9/92
###
...then Indiana senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate during a news conference
in which he was asked his opinion of the Holocaust
"The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history...this  century's history.... We all lived in this century.  I didn't live in this century."
 Vice President Dan Quayle
     (And I have trouble reading and writing with my  Aphasia! Louis H. Albert )


"Strange! that a Man who has wit enough to write a Satire should have folly enough to publish it."
###
"A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one."
###
"We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."
the Continental Congress, Philadelphia,
before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July, (1776)
 Benjamin Franklin


"Time has only a relative existence."
Carlyle
(1795-1881)
"It is unsound and contradictory to expect that which has never been done, can be done, except by means which have never yet been tried."
Francis Bacon
Novum Organum


On statistics
"What do you want it to say?"
Louis H. Albert
Jail Statistician

"The perspective is realist because it assumes that causal relationships exist outside of the human mind, and it is critical - realist because it assumes that these valid causal relationships cannot be perceived with total accuracy by our imperfect sensory and interceptive capacities. And the perspective is evolutionary because it assumes a special survival value to knowing about causes and, is particular, about manipulable causes."
Thomas D. Cook
Donald T. Campbell
Quasi-Experimentation
Design & Analysis Issues for Field Settings


"Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values.  That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values."
Gerald Brenan
 British writer (1894-1987)


"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."
###
attrib.
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
H. L. Mencken

"If one assents to Simon’s definition of “a natural science [is] a body of knowledge about [a] class of things - objects or phenomena - in the world: about the characteristics and properties that they have; about how they behave and interact with each other,” then natural science would be viewed as a descriptive process. However, the social sciences not only fell this descriptive role, but perform a prescriptive one as well.  This is especially true of the policy sciences of policy analysis from its ex ante. point of reference."
###
"As I stated earlier, the problem definition or structuring aspect of the policy analysis process is not an isolated event.  In order for this process to proceed, the defining process must join with the total policy process.  Ackoff claims that a problem is “solved” when its value outcome is maximized.  When a policy maker “satisfies,” as opposed to maximizes, then he claims the problem has been resolved.  One dissolves a problem when the values are no longer meaningful within the framework of alliterative.  Wildavsky describes this process as a “route” that the process travels.  Going back to my original metaphor of the macramé knot, it is the twisting of the threads together that brings the problem to definition and ultimate solution."
Louis H. Albert


"We have passed from anger about what's going on in our political system to cynicism and alienation."
David L. Boren
  President of the University of Oklahoma

"...Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know's on third. "
Bud (William) Abbott (1895-1974)
Lou Costello (Louis Francls Criatlleo 1906-1956)


"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
A. J. Liebling
  U.S. journalist, author  (1904-1963)


"To the living we owe respect, but the dead we owe only the truth."
###
"A witty saying proves nothing."
Voltalre
French philosopher, writer (1694 - 1778)
"Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile."
Albert Schweitzer


"It is better to be lucky than to be good!"
Louis H. Albert


"The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas."
Benedict de Spinoza
Philosopher and theologian (1632-1677)

"We're on a Mission from God!"
The Blues Brothers


"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
###
"I can resist everything except temptation."
###
"There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
###
"The artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless."
Oscar Wilde
Anglo-Irish playwright, author (1854-1900)


"Basically, get the ride started. I'm ready to go."
Douglas M. Buchanan Jr.
"Asked if he had a final statement, Buchanan smiled at witnesses in a booth adjacent to the death chamber ..."
Man Who Killed Relatives Executed - Richmond, Va. - 3/18/98 -The Associated Press

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
Their Finest Hour
###
...at a meeting with Harry Truman
"The last time you and I sat across the conference table was at Potsdam, Mr. President.  I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard then.  I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt.  I misjudged you badly.  Since that time, you more than any other man, have saved Western civilization."
1/5/52 quoted in "Truman" by David McCulough


###
"This is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  It is perhaps the end of the beginning."

Churchill after victory at El Alamein, the first significant victory against Hitler.
###
Note that Churchill said "it has been said," acknowledging that it was not original. But where it came from has not been found.
He also said, "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations," and studied "Bartlett's" intently.

"Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

    House of Commons, 11 November, 1947
Winston Churchill


"If you cannot convince them, confuse them."
###
"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."
###
"Give me a one-handed economist!  All my economists say, 'on one hand... on the other."
###
"Men make history and not the other way around.  In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. "
Harry S. Truman
Thirty Third President 1945-1953


"Couple million here, couple million there, pretty soon you're talking about serious money."
Sen. Everett Dirksen
U.S. politician, leader of the Senate Republicans during the
                      Kennedy and Johnson administrations.(1896-1969)

Is this Urban Legends.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
       -Charles H. Duell, Commissioner,
U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
Inventure Place
The National Inventors Hall of Fame
PAST PREDICTIONS


"The jail runs because it has to"
Louis H. Albert
When One of my bosses accused me of not being a team player, I responded with:
"You could not be more incorrect, I am very much a team player.  It just that we happen to be on different teams."
Richard D. Reese


"This poor little one-horse town."

The Undertaker's Chat  (1875)
###
"When in doubt tell the truth."
Following the Equator : A Journey Around the World  (1897])
###
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
American author (1835-1910)

"Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."
###
"There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy."
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
(1842-1914)

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will not ... the world is full of educated derelicts. The slogan "Press On" has solved, and always will solve the problems of the human race."
         Calvin Coolidge
(1872-1933)

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."
Kurt Vonnegut

"No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney."
Alfred E Smith

"In California, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into TV shows."
Woody Allen


"Words are loaded pistols."
Jean-Paul Sartre

"Men who dare to insult teachers and philosophers should be loathed like sinners against the gods."
Isocrates


"One picture is worth ten thousand words"
- ascribed to Chinese origin
Frederick Barnard
 in Printer's Ink 12/8/21

"If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence.  If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.  The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favorable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel."
Arthur S. Eddington
The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." New
###
Russell's answer:
"Francis Bacon, a man who rose to eminence by betraying his friends, asserted, no doubt as one of the ripe lessons of experience, that- knowledge is power"
Bertrand Russell
from "A History of Western Philosophy and Its...," in In Praise of Idleness (1935)


"'For you- "My county right or wrong' is like saying, "My mother drunk or sober.'"
G. K. Chesterton

I have a Dream
...When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
"Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Martin Luther King, Jr.

(This quotation is from Inca Atahuallpa's answer to Fray Wicente Valverde, taken from Spanish documents of the Indian Archives in
Seville. M.37. I  (show with no comment!)
"Be advised that I, being free, do not have to pay tribute to anyone, nor do I believe there is a king greater than I. However, I will have the pleasure to be the friend of your emperor, since he should be a great prince to send his armies throughout the world. But this Pope does not interest me; much less will I obey him, I being in the kingdom of my father and our religion being good and I and my subjects are happy. However, despite my being a son of Huayna Capac I cannot discuss anything so wise and old. The Christ that you speak of died, the Sun and Moon never die, besides how do you know your god created the world?"
 This quotation is from Inca Atahuallpa's answer to
Fray Wicente Valverde,
taken from Spanish documents of the
Indian Archives in Seville. M.37.

"Education: something you pay for, but hope you don't get it"
Vernon F. Cook
First Director
The Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics

"They came for the Communists, and I didn't object For I wasn't a Communist; They came for the Socialists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Socialist; They came for the labor leaders, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a labor leader; They came for the Jews, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Jew; Then they came for me - And there was no one left to object."
Martin Niemoller
German Protestant Pastor, (1892-1984)

on Richard Nixon
"He told us he was going to take crime out of the streets. He did. He took it into the damn White House."
Ralph Abernathy
(1926-1990)

"When I was a boy I was told anyone could become President, I'm beginning to believe it"
###
"The Open Shop" 1904
The maintenance of a certain grade of and scale of living compensation for labor is vital to the interests of our people...The protection of working men in this rate of wages is the protection of the land.
Clarence Darrow
(1857-1938)

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
 associate justice of the U.S. (1841-1935)

"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."
Muhammad Ali
(1942-____)

"Art is anything you can get away with."
###

"Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."

Marshall McLuhan,
"The Medium Is the Massage"

aphasia
"...entered a world of corageous people that were prisoners of their brains."
María Paneyko
a neuropsychologist working in Venezuela.
Actually I´m the only one in this country

Valedictory Speeches
"You people are not prepared.You are well-educated and you look cute, but that's not going to cut it."
Bill Cosby
 Univ. of Maryland
More Valedictory Speeches

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysberg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly dvanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
Abraham Lincoln's
"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States."
The Chicago Times newspaper
November 1863
###
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
Mr. Lincoln's Virtual Library
The Abraham Lincoln Association

"Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance"
~ Anon
Jan Null, CCM
Certified Consulting Meteorologist
Golden Gate Weather Services

HARVEY
"I've been wrestling with reality for 35 years and I'm happy Doctor; I've finally won out over it."
Elwood P. Dowd
Jimmy Stewart
1950

"Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortune."
Andre Gide
French novelist and critic (1869-1951)

"I've studied new Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas, Theology
From end to end with labor keen;
 And here, poor fool;
with all my lore I stand no wiser than before."
###
"We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden."
###
"We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to."
Goethe
(1749-1832)

"A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one."
Moliere

"Diabetes is a wonderful affection, not very frequent among men, being a melting down of the flesh and limbs into urine. life is short, disgusting and painful, thirst unquenchable, death inevitable."
Aretaeus, the Cappadocian
c. 200

"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars."
###
Generation of Swine
" If there is, in fact, a Heaven and a Hell, all we know for sure is that Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix..."
###
"Consciousness Expansion' went out with LBJ . . . And it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon."
Hunter S. Thompson

"To be great is to be misunderstood."
###
"Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend and I'm not thine."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803 - 1882)

"The only thing experience teaches us is that experience teaches us nothing."
Andre Maurois
 French  author (1885-1967)

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality."
 Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321)

"When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one."
Helen Rowland
American journalist (1875-1950)

"I took off my own hat and saw it was empty.  I began to feel like an empty hat myself."
 Carl Sandburg

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
 Henry Ward Beecher

"We must believe in free will.  We have no other choice."
Isaac Bashevis Singer


"I was teaching and talking about murder and homicide and it dawned on me that instead of getting married, if I murdered my fiancé  (wife) I would be free by now."
Lou Albert
The Department of Criminal Justice Studies, Kent State University
cira 1994

"I made a remark a long time ago, I said I was very pleased that  television was now showing murder stories, because it's  bringing murder back into its rightful setting-in the home."
Alfred Hitchcock
film director    (1899 - 1980)

Before singing  "Quite Early Morning"
Pete Seeger & Alro GuthrieTOGETHER, 1975
"My father said in his own musicalogical way,
plagiarism is basic to all culture."
Pete Seeger
###
taking on "Celery - Time"
Alro Guthrie & Pete Seeger, PRECIOUS FRIEND, 1982
"But you can't always do what you're supposed to do. But ... no ... but what they say..."
Alro Guthrie
"Irish Blessing"
"May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
May the rain fall soft upon your fields,
And until we meet again,..."


"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller,  richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."
P. J.O'Rourke

"Less is more"
Mies van der Rohe
architect(1886-1969)

"Hesitation is the best cure for anger."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
 Spanish-born Roman statesman, philosopher (c. 4 BC - AD 65)

"People change and forget to tell each other."
Lillian Hellman

"No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it."
Charles Schulz

"We are torn between the craving to know and the despair of having known."
Dr. Carl Sagan


"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
General William Westmoreland

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
Dave Barry

"Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candate."
Mark B. Cohen

"Democracy is an abuse of statistics."
Jorge Luis Borges

"The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth."
Edith Sitwell


"Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early."
###
"Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by
committee meetings."
George Will
political commentator

"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
G. M. Trevelyan

"That's not a lie. It's a terminological inexactitude."
Alexander Haig


"Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected."
Robert Orben
"Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary."
Robert Louis Stevenson
Author and Poet (1850-1894)


"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

"Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them."
Dr. Martin Henry Fisher

"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who have not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
Howard Scott

"It was just an any old kind of day; the kind that comes and slips away."
  Harry Chapin
Singer Songwriter (1942 - 1981)

"When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest."
Bullwinkle Moose


In the fall of 1964 I went to a concert by Theodore Bikel. Before intermission he did an act in which played the harmonica, played the guitar, sung and danced! As the applause started to stop, He said:

"That is not necessarily what I wanted to be remembered for!"

Theodore Bikel
I have used this quote many time, especially when I was going my consulting business in jails and prisons.
Louis Albert


"There she was: dejected, desperate, and stoned. Everything I could have hoped for in a woman."
Louis DePalma
Robert De Niro  (Taxi)

"A formal education can sometimes be broadening but more often merely flattens."
###
"Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth."
Edward Abbey
(1927-1989)

The melody has haunted me for as long as I can remember.
Sometimes it just pops into mind, but I can't remember the verse. Now it's here forever.

The Teddy Bears' Picnic (song)

1. If you go down to the woods today
You're sure of a big surprise
If you go down to the woods today
You'd better go in disguise
4. Beneath the trees where nobody sees
They'll hide and seek as long as they please
Cause that's the way the Teddy Bears have
their picnic
7. Picnic time for Teddy Bears
The little Teddy Bears are having a lovely time today
Watch them, catch them unawares
And see them picnic on their holiday.
2. For ev'ry bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain, because
Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their
                  picnic.
5. If you go down to the woods today
You'd better not go alone
It's lovely down in the woods today
But safer to stay at home
8. See them gaily gad about
They love to play and shout;
They never have any care;
3. Ev'ry Teddy Bear who's been good
Is sure of a treat today.
There's lots of marvelous things to eat
And wonderful games to play
6. For ev'ry bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain, because
Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their
picnic.
9. At six o'clock their Mummies and Daddies,
Will take them home to bed,
Because they're tired little Teddy Bears.
Jimmy Kennedy
Music by John W. Bratton

"If I wasn't sick, I would have to be a Hypochondriac!"
Louis Albert


"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
Albert Camus
1913-1960 French Existential Writer


"Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody is listening."
Nick Diamos


"Seriousness is the refuge of the shallow."
     Rita Mae Brown
VENUS ENVY, ch. 17.

"People want economy and they will pay any price to get it."
Lee Iacocca


"My interest in the future is because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."
Charles F. Kettering


"I learn by going where I have to go."
Theodore Roethke


"Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind."
Leonardo da Vinci
Italian painter, drawing, sculptor, architect, engineer, and journaler (1452-1519)

"My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking."
Ferdinand Foch
(1851-1929)

"Speech has power and few realize that words do not fade. What starts out as a sound ends in a deed."
Abraham Heschel
philosopher

On my High school graduation, June 4, 1964, Lewistown, PA, someone asked me how did I feel? I said:
"Unemployed!"
Louis H. Albert
     Co-Chairman and Professor


"Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time."
Lou Brock
Baseball Player - Outfielder

"Behind every argument is someone's ignorance."
Louis Brandeis


"It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all."
###
"There are two kinds of light--the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures."
James Thurber


"We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed."
Thomas Fuller, M.D.
(1654-1734)

Chronic heartburn
The story if my life! Lou Albert
"I can't believe I ate the whole thing."
line from Alka-Seltzer advertisement

"...and the Jews inside would be poisoned."
Following Orders...
"A life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."
  Adolf Eichmann
(in writings reported in the NY Times, 8/13/99)

"Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas."
Paula Poundstone

"The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall.
He frees himself and shows the way to others.
Freedom and slavery are mental states."
Mahatma Gandhi

"He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress."
Anwar al-Sadat
Egyptian President

"I like to have quotations ready for every occasion. ...They give one's ideas so pat, and save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one's feeling."
Robert Burns
Letter to Agnes McLehose, 14 January 1788

"An honest politician is one who when he's bought, stays bought."
Attributed to Simon Cameron
U.S. Senator  (1799-1889)

"The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination."
###
"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across."
     Julian Simon
Professor of Business Administration (1932-1998)

"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
W. Somerset Maugham

"How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying."
     Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)
      Under the Volcano  [1947], ch. 12

"That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
Calvin comic strip
William B. Watterson II,
       CALVIN AND HOBBES

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."
W. C. Fields

"No one is too old if they have a passion to learn. To absorb new ideas is to live anew, to see the world with fresh eyes."
Beth Chatto

"Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it's not all mixed up."
A. A. Milne

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
attributed - Edmund Burke
(1729-1797)

"All change is not growth; all movement is not forward."
Ellen Glasgow

"I fear nothing, I hope nothing, I am free."
Nikos Kazatzakis

Comment after having lost 5 of the last 6 primaries as Gerald Ford's campaign manager;
quoted in Washington Post (May 16, 1976)
"I'm not going to rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic."
Rogers Morton (1914-1979)
American public relations officer

"There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it".
Mary Wilson Little


Zoë is a friend who we communicate with out long writing.  We send email cards and small messages.
She sent me these quotes that help to communicate with ideas with out necessarily writing or speaking.
"...procrastinating is hard work."
Zoë L. Langley
MAYBE IT IS MORNING (Life After Stroke)

..explaining how he felt after being hit on the head by a ball in the 1934 World Series
"The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing."
Dizzy Dean
"There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which politicial institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality."
de Tocqueville


"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
Thomas Stearns (TS) Eliot
The Hollow Men, 1925


"Good artists copy; great artists steal"
Pablo Picasso


"If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still."
Samuel Johnson
(Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides)

Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.
Ernie Kovacs

"When I bore people at a party, they think it is their fault."
Henry Kissinger


"Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine."
Lord Byron


"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain."
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968 )
Blind and deaf writer and educator


Occam's Razor
"Entities are not to be multiplied beyond."
William of Occam,
scholar, philosopher, and one of England's more controversial thinks.


"Sex is the biggest nothing of our time"
Andy Wahol


"I seem to be a verb."
 R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted in Hugh Kenner, _Bucky_, 1973

"Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
Alan Cox


"I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior."
Hippolyte Taine
1828–93, French critic and historian

Chief of Police of Montgomery County, Md., was quoted in the 11/13/02
Washington Post on the public's improved opinion of police after the sniper incidents:
"People have been very positive. They're now waving at
us with all five fingers, and that does feel nice."
Charles Moose

ON SPECULATION9 CLEARING IT UP
"There has been a lot of speculation, and I believe there will continue to be a lot of speculation until the speculation ends,"
President George W. Bush

Warning label on a decorative rock garden set called Popcorn Rock
"EATING ROCKS MAY LEAD TO BROKEN TEETH."
Byron David Albert
Enjoying rock climbing

"If you walk backwards, you'll find out that you can go forward and people won't know if you're coming or going."
baseball great ?

Retraction notice ix The lawyer!
"Last week the Lawyer incorrectly stated that Maurice Millen, who was leaving DAC to join Macfarlanes, was a senior lawyer. Millen was DAC's head of IT We apologize to the two firms for any inconvenience this may have caused. We would also like to apologize to Millen for any embarrassment caused by calling him a lawyer"

  The lawyer

Trying to explain the team's losing streak!
  "The problem here is that we haven't solved the problem. And its been an ongoing problem."

Carolina Panthers head coach George Seifert



April 12,  2004

Lou Albert
(I cannot read and write! If you have find an error please let me know.)

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