Past Quotes.

They tell me that you are going to make me give you all the money I make from January until May, this year and every year; but that you want me to give it to you today, April 15th. Now how am I supposed to give you money that I haven't even made yet? If you tell me that I am supposed to borrow it, then I will tell you that it is no wonder there is such a big National Debt. If you tell me you don't care how I get it, you just want it, and you want it now, then I will tell you that it is no wonder the Mob has become the Good Guys on television.

Before you go trusting the words of any government you might want to consider the following:

"Enclosed is your Vehicle License Fee (VLF) Rebate. Because of California's healthy economy, California motorists are receiving another tax break in the form of a 32.5 percent VLF Rebate. The new tax break is in addition to the current 35 percent VLF Offset, for a total car tax cut of 67.5 percent.

Consult your tax professional to determine what portion of the VLF may be tax deductible."

 The enclosed cheque was for $1.00 

I am quite sure that I have never paid any Vehicle License Fee of less than $2.00. Do I detect the fine art of Weasel Wording here? Am I sure that there would be plenty of smoke and mirrors available, at very high cost to the taxpayer, if I called to inquire? Does this tax cut mean anything in terms of how much the State Government will continue to pull from mine empty pockets?

Continue to Doubt Until You Have Evidence Enough to Give You Faith.

 "Then there was the child psychologist who was heard to mutter: 'I have always depended upon the strangeness of kinders.'"

 --John Wildermuth

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and good with catsup!

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"Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another: For virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time."

Mary Renault, in "Fire From Heaven," making reference to Aristotle's teaching to Alexander.

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"You're Only Young Once, But You Can Stay Immature Indefinitely."

Ogden Nash 

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"My heart is shrammed to fully realize that our leaders' heads are full of daddock."

Jon DeCles 

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"The most unmentionable things are always the wonderfullest."

Herman Melville

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"Many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war. They come at it from an intellectual perspective, versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off."

--Found this note from election materials about nine years old. One gathers that salaries have gone up since then. Well, theirs: not mine.

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"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

--U.S. President Abraham Lincoln

November 21, 1864

(letter to Col. Willaim F. Elkiins)

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"It is a simple question. If marriage is a Sacrament and ordained by God, then it belongs in the hands of the churches, not in the hands of the government . If it is a civil contract, then everyone must be held to have equal access to it before the law. I will perform marriages, but I will not sign marriage licenses, because the courts have no business in religious matters. It is a violation of the separation of Church and state."

Bishop Michael Zaharakis, 1978

"It is to the advantage of all religious establishments to maintain their own definitions of their own sacraments. Many have died in religious wars because of small differences between sects, even within single religions. It would be a dire move backward for all religions to allow our governments to tell us what we are permitted to believe about anything: the very opposite of religious freedom."

Bishop Thomas-Patrick Donald Valentine, 1997 

"When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul."

Philip Jose Farmer in "The Dark Design"

"After the crudity of the previous year, the 2005 Superbowl provided a conservative and patriotic spectacle such as the world has not seen for many years. The only sad part was that Leni Riefenstahl was no longer alive to film it."

Olin T. Fredegar

"Just remember, when you find your mother eating cat food because her Social Security benefits have been reduced to fund another foreign war: you voted for Bush!"

"The Republicans are all for small government: just big enough to fit in my bedroom."

--John Wildermuth 

"We have been told for quite a while now that women are just as strong and just as smart as men. That has been the conventional wisdom. --But if that is the case, why are they not strong enough to lower a toilet seat without help from a man? And why are they not smart enough to notice whether the seat is up or down before they sit?" 

--Olin T. Fredegar  

"I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."

--Emo Phillips

"It is tragic to consider the sorry state of the historic buildings that are so important a part of our National Heritage. It is downright shameful that we should be dependent on foreign investors to supply the funding for their upkeep. What would the White House look like today, were it not for the influx of cash from Saudi Arabia that maintains the shrubbery?"

--Olin T. Fredegar

"In a stunning piece of Republician thinking, it has been announcced that the Pentagon will save a great deal of money by closing and restructuring many military bases during wartime. The next great expense cutting procedure is expected to be in coordination with the exporting of American jobs to other countries: they're going to lay off all the Americian warriors and replace them with soldiers hired from other countries. Considering the intimate connections between the Bush family and the bin Laden family, we can look forward to giving full employment to all those jobless folks in Afganistan and Iraq real soon now."

Olin T. Fredegar

 "A real man loves strong women, whether as lovers or just as friends, because weak ones are boring, often parasitical, and make the worst exes."

Isaac Bonewits

On noting the masses of restrictions put in place on the daily lives of San Franciscans in recent years: 

"Somehow, the City That Knows How has become the City That Won't Allow."

--Olin T. Fredegar

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."

--Mark Twain 

"I believe it was the State of Illinois that used to define Sodomy as 'That Vile and Unmentionable Crime Against Nature.' Given the bills attacking the environment which the current congress has repeatedly introduced, I am left to assume what they meant by that was joining the Republican Party."

--Olin T. Fredegar

"The world is not respectable, it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the Spirit blooms...

--George Santayana

"I was once stranded for 24 hours in Houston, self-proclaimed Fat Capital of the World, and I have never seen so many enormously fat people in my life, nor felt such a juvenile but well-nigh irrepressible urge to laugh out loud. The reason they are all so fat is that they drive everywhere, and stuff themselves from dawn till long after dusk with double choc-chip deep fried spicy pepperoni monster pizzas topped with extra cheddar-style cheese, and gallon bargain-buckets of buffalo wings on the side. This is not a dignified way to behave."

(I found this on the net but my computer lost the writer: I believe he is a columnist for the London Times.)

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 "Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days."

--W. C. Fields

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"None (of the delegates) wanted an executive who would use the excuse of sudden or continuing crisis to gather more and more powers to himself, to draw political power away from the states and communities to the central government -- and, within the central government, away from the legislature and the judiciary to the office of the executive."

James Madison, in his notes on the Constitutional Convention at which the Government of the United States of America was formed.

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"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."

--Harper Lee, author of "To Kill A Mockingbird."

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A Prominant Republican Speaks Out About the War 

"Why should we hear about body bags and death?  It's not relevant.  So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

--Barbara Bush

(May 18 2003 on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer)

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"Three months before the election, the Oleocrats in Congress have seen to it that gasoline prices are going down. They could have done it all along, but their greed prevented them. Now, with the prospect that they will lose their positions (though not thier self-elected pensions), those Republicans are running scared. They are counting on the notorious three month maximum memory of the American public to forget $3.50 for a gallon of regular gas. They will probably pull another horrific rabbit out of another deceptive hat. Well, don't you forget that price! And be prepared for the price to go up within a week after you vote."

--Olin T. Fredegar

Historical Note: Mr. Fredegar's prediction was pretty accurate. The week before the election gasoline was down to $2.21 at a station we frequent. Within a week after the election it was up to $2.45. On a trip to Los Angeles we found it up to $2.79. --We should probably remember that the oil industry does not represent the people in Congress. Rather, the people in Congress have been representing the oil industry, a far worse sin. Some of them have now been kicked out, but the housecleaning now requires their replacements to do something about all this rampant greed.

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If someone asks you:

What is the nature of tea?

Say it is the sound

Of the wind blowing through the pines

In a painting.

--Sen Sotan

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"Love is when someone else's happiness becomes essential to you."

--Robert A. Heinlein 

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"The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."

--Clint Eastwood

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On Electronic Books:

"Noted prescription drug abuser Fat Rich Limpbaugh, daily ejaculates his weak, transparent arguments upon the floor of public opinion, where it is lapped up by his followers under the illusion that it is intellectually nourishing: it is not!”

--Olin T. Fredegar

"I would have voted for Satan, to keep the Borrow and Spend Republicans from winning the election. Unfortunately, she was running on the Republican ticket.”

--Olin T. Fredegar

"The emerging agreement includes tax breaks for businesses that the president said would contribute to the economy's recovery from the worst recession in eight decades."

Mr. President, Obama, Dude! That 'recession' eighty years ago was callled The Great Depression! And we didn't get out of it by giving bonuses to billionaires, we got out of it by putting Americans back to work! Old-Timers are no longer laughing at the Works Progress Administration! Do you want to be remembered with Franklin Delano Roosevelt or with poor old Herbert Hoover?

"I've been having bad dreams, where the Republicans take our house from us and throw us out in the street and we, literally, starve to death!"

--Byron Gabriel DeCles, age 8

"I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being - to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame."

Elizabeth Taylor,

Actress

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

--Mark Twain

Only actions that infringe on the rights of others can properly be termed crimes.

"Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."

from The Silver Key

by H. P. Lovecraft

"He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses."

--Horace, Roman philosopher.

"Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." 

- Robert Benchley

"I may not agree with the [gay] lifestyle. And I don't. But that has nothing to do with the civil rights of that member of our -- that part of our constituency. ... Housing and employment are not special rights. ... I think the right to live somewhere and to live where you please or to work where you please, as long as you're not bothering anybody else, is a basic right, not a -- not a special right. ... Civil rights for all Americans -- black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera -- is not a liberal or a conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on".

--Antigay activist the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, on MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson, Aug. 5, according to Atlanta's Southern Voice, Aug. 24.

"If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience."
--Woodrow Wilson, former U.S. President

"There are worse things than suicide. Being forced to read Joan Didion comes immediately to mind."

--Olin T. Fredegar

"I've said it before, I'll say it again. 99% of all lawyers give the rest a bad name."

--David Gerrold,

Author of "The Trouble With Tribbles" and many wonderful books.

"What kills the skunk is the publicity it gives itself."

--Abraham Lincoln,

Former U.S. President