Smart Mouths 67

Collected by Staff of Magellan's Log

Clearly Bush's handlers want to leave the impression that he's not just courageous and competent but hung.
                                                   –Richard Goldstein, Village Voice,
                                                     May 21-27, 2003, on the president’s
                                                     aircraft carrier appearance
                                                     in fighter-pilot drag.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. George W Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world.
                                                  –Hunter S. Thompson.

Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood – that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.
                                                   –Abraham Lincoln, 1848,
                                                     on Pres. James Polk’s war with Mexico.

Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.
                                                   –Rep. Debbie Riddle, Republican
                                                     member of the Texas House of
                                                     Representatives, May, 2003.

Let the words I utter today be sweet and tasty, for I may have to eat them tomorrow.
                                                   –Mo Udall.

Homosexuality is not unnatural. Mowing your lawn is unnatural.
                                                     –Protestor outside the Texas
                                                       Legislature, April, 2003.

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.
                                                   –Albert Murray, "The Omni-Americans."

America now rules the world, either directly or by proxy, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
                                                   –John Bradley, editor,
                                                       The Arab News, April 9, 2003.

It’s simply impossible to be cynical enough about marketing.
                                                   –Editor, Advertising Age magazine.

Don't sleep with anybody who doesn't love this film.
                                                   –John Waters, in Artforum, on Gerry.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American.
                                                   –Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., age 80 (2002).

Tourists are brown folks who get on planes and come to America and do bad things, so we're having a war on tourism.
                                                   –George W. Bush, in Jason Butcher’s play,
                                                       The Madness of George Dubya.

The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society.
                                                   –Arundhati Roy.

For Americans, morality has nothing at all to do with ethics or right action . . . Morality is SEX, SEX, SEX.
                                                   –Gore Vidal.

A lot of people who used to claim their color was red now claim their color is green.
                                                   –Floyd Brown, Young America’s Foundation.

While the communists were there, the capitalists curbed their greed and avarice. They showed a friendly face. But now there is no more other side. The friendly face of capitalism is not needed any more. Now capitalists can do what they like, and what they like is simply to make more money for themselves.
                                                   –Mahathir Mohamad,
                                                       prime minister of Malaysia.

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
                                                   –Donna Haraway.

When I began to compare myself to other composers, I could hardly bring myself to pay any attention.
                                                   –Beethoven (1801).

Classical music offers not merely the basic pleasures of melody, harmony and rhythm, but the meanings which these elements can reveal when explored in the process of composition by a master. It is just this intense emotional and intellectual engagement, shared by composer and listener, that pop music and pop culture reject: it is definitely not cool, a quality which denies complexity, in which work followed by chilling out define the parameters of being human.
                                                   –The Economist (1-9-03),
                                                       in a review of Julian Johnson’s
                                                       Who Needs Classical Music.