Smart Mouths 63

Collected (Again) by the Staff of Magellan's Log

The man who dies rich dies disgraced.
                                            –Andrew Carnegie.

I am currently suing God under the Trade Descriptions Act on the grounds that, as a very meek person, I should by now have inherited the Earth, yet I still haven’t been offered as much as Majorca, or even a slice of Basildon.
              –Victor Lewis-Smith, TV critic, London Evening Standard.

The definition of "terrorism" is based purely on whether an act of violence is committed by a group of rich people or a group of poor people.
                                                                  –Robert Anton Wilson.

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
                                                                          –Freud.

When I was five, a rocket came to our house with a strong, bad voice and killed my kind father.
                                                   –Hossai, Afghanistan (age 5).

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
                                                              –Martin Luther King Jr.

I am very hungry and naked. I feel very unhappy and homesick.
                                                    –Nyanthon Rou, Sudan (age 14).

What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
                            –John le Carré, in the Times of London, 1-15-03.

These people came called the freedom fighters and attacked us in our village. I did not know where my mother and father was and up till now I still do not know. They captured me under my mother's bed and took me away. I was with them for four years in the bush.
                                     –Betty Kamanda, Sierra Leone (age 12).

Museum attendance topped 1 billion for the first time last year [2002], more than double admissions to professional sports events.
                                                            –United Press International.

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.
                                                                        –Martha Graham.

[Humanism is] a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth… Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?
                                                             –John Gray, in Straw Dogs.

"The [British] Empire... was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush," just as, it might be added, the American Empire is founded on an apparently universal appetite for slabs of greasy processed beef, chunks of chicken concreted over with batter, and blistery, lava-like oozings of pizza. Empires should come with a health warning.
                             –Peter Conrad, reviewing Niall Ferguson’s Empire,
                               in the Guardian (1-5-03).