Smart Mouths 65

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

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
                                                                  –Tom Lehrer.

When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right.
                                                                  –Bill Clinton (2002).

There is no hell. There is only France.
                                                                  –Frank Zappa.

To have turned down the Légion d'Honneur is not enough. One should never have deserved it.
                                                                  –Erik Satie.

The world is not enhanced to any measurable degree by one, or one million, confrontations with venal, lazy waiters.
                                                                  –John D. MacDonald.

[Fundamentalism] is basically a textual affair. Fundamentalists are those who believe that our linguistic currency is trustworthy only if it is backed by the gold standard of the Word of Words… Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs, in love with a dead letter. The letter of the sacred text must be rigidly embalmed if it is to imbue life with the certitude and finality of death.
                                                                  –Terry Eagleton,
                                                                     in The Guardian, March 1, 2003.

In matters of translation there are some exactitudes that are the equivalent of infidelities.
                                                                  –Franz Liszt.

Ulysses is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant.
                                                                  –Aldous Huxley.

The only two things you can kill with a handgun or tin cans and people.
                                                                  –John D. MacDonald.

If the technology is controlling us [film makers], it will transform us into stupid children, and in a way, part of the American cinema does that… [Americans] always understood that the first way to occupy a country was to impose their films.
                                                                  –Bernard Tavernier.

When scientists decide to "settle" the hard questions of ethics and meaning, for instance, they usually manage to make fools of themselves, for a simple reason: They are smart but ignorant. The reason philosophers spend so much of their time and energy raking over the history of the field is that the history of philosophy consists, in large measure, of very tempting mistakes, and the only way to avoid making them again and again is to study how the great thinkers of the past got snared by them. Scientists who think their up-to-date scientific knowledge renders them immune to the illusions that lured Aristotle and Hume and Kant and the others into such difficulties are in for a rude awakening.
                                                                  –Daniel D. Dennett.

If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.
                                                                  –Hebb’s Rule.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
                                                                  –Dwight Eisenhower.

We may feel better if we dismiss our "demons" as inhuman. Unfortunately, the Hitlers and all their kind are our creation. They are us, and we had better find out what it is that makes some of us turn into grotesque monsters.
                                                                  –Si Lewen, letter,
                                                                     New York Times (2-16-03).

Clara Schumann did it all not only backward and in heels, but pregnant and before the advent of lithium.
                                                                  –Stacy Schiff, reviewing Clara,
                                                                     by Janice Galloway,
                                                                     New York Times Book Review
                                                                     (2-16-03).

END