Human Nature
Man is unique among animals.  It’s the only one with a sense of self-importance.

When the team we root for wins we think ourselves superior.

To man the dog is a paragon of fidelity, to the wolf, of subservience.

Mankind is an endangering species.

We hate and fear rejection because it makes us feel we were stupid to ask.

The names we give our children tell more about us than they do about them.

We are all islands in our minds.

We are all part miscreant part hero.

Sex wouldn't be nearly so interesting if it weren’t so widely forbidden.

Only unfulfilled love is perfect.  All other kinds require tolerance for human defects.

We confuse writers with the values they espouse; just because they applaud virtue doesn’t mean they practice it.

What’s sauce for the goose isn’t necessarily sauce for the gander.

Speed limits were made to be exceeded.

Ponce de Leon was looking in the wrong place.  While he searched Florida for the fountain of youth, he was carrying it in his head all along.

As parents we tend to overcompensate for the shortcomings of our own upbringings.

Sometimes we achieve peace more through struggle than detachment, provided the struggle is not on one’s own behalf, but for the benefit of others.

Cynics are as often disillusioned idealists as callous egoists.

There are as many centers of the universe as there are people.

Some use their intellect to seek truth, others to justify their preconceptions.

The truly strong are those who aren’t driven by the need to prove their strength.

Man is an animal with grandiose ideas.

Flattery will get you almost anywhere.

We have mastered time and are its slaves.

We are joined to our children by constricting bands of empathy.

Lawyers, actors and politicians must fool others.  In the process they often fool themselves.

People are always the same, but never the same.

Human beings are the opposite of butterflies.  We turn into caterpillars.

Sometimes the greatest sophisticates are the greatest naïfs.

Let’s not forget that great men aren’t always good men.

The Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, Ruanda, Darfur.  What kind of animal is man?

Some people are sheep in wolves’ clothing.

We see others’ irrationality, but not out own.

One doesn’t have to get angry because somebody else does.

All mothers are virgins in their children’s eyes.

Humans have great difficulty accepting themselves for what they are.

If you can imagine it, somebody’s done it, and, if you can’t imagine it, somebody’s done that too.

The human animal is much preoccupied with reproduction.

Why isn’t it enough that things are what they are?

We have the notion that it’s somehow noble to be human.  It’s true that we have exceptional capabilities compared to other members of the animal kingdom, but among those capabilities are an exceptional aptitude for doing harm to, even destroying, other creatures, our own kind, and our planet.

Intellectualizing is what intellectuals accuse each other of doing.

We accumulate things to do like barnacles.

Bird watching and yoga have become competitive sports.  What does that tell you about our society?

The main challenge to human welfare is human nature.

The trouble with Freud was that he suffered from uterus envy.

It’s too bad we don’t suffer from pre-traumatic stress syndrome.  There might be fewer wars.

Our intelligence enabled us to triumph over all other animals.  Unfortunately it may not be sufficient to prevent us from rendering our planet inhospitable to human life.

We’re intelligent enough to imperil our planet.  Let’s hope we’re intelligent enough to save it from ourselves.

Words are the source of most human strife.

We get along so well with dogs because they can’t talk back.

Even saints aren’t altogether saintly.

When someone undermines our dignity we want to inflict the same pain on them, to restore the balance.

We devote so much effort to perfecting the quality of our lives that it ends up detracting from their quality.

Sometimes the fool is wiser than the wise men.

We tend to forget that not all mothers are saints, nor all soldiers heroes.

Personal libraries are a form of ostentation.

“Fiscal conservatives” are those who despise altruism, except where it saves them from having to pay taxes.

Nobody climbs Everest because it’s there.  They climb it because that’s where the top of the pecking order is.

Now I know what over the hill means.  It’s when most of your ailments are no longer curable and you just have to learn to live with them.

It may be sweet to do nothing, as the saying goes, but after a while it becomes demoralizing.

The problem with people who are cool is that they often lack warmth.

Men of great intelligence can sometimes be great fools.

Why can’t we dislike something without having to see it as bad?

Men need the softness of women.  There’s so much hardness in our lives.

One can enjoy life without being an expert in anything.

Nationalism is just another form of tribalism, and too often that’s the case with religion as well.

Rhetoric, alas, is more powerful than reason.

Places that are the height of the exotic to us are banal to those who live there.


Profundity
Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s profound.

Things have no deeper meanings.

In philosophy, theology and the arts we often think profound that which we have difficulty understanding, but maybe it’s just incomprehensible.

What is seen as profound is usually the obscure or that of which no evidence exists.

Profundity isn’t so much the revelation of difficult to discern truths as the setting aside of deeply rooted notions.

Spare me from significance.

The trouble with theory is that it often prevents us from seeing reality.

Beware of big ideas.

Many can’t distinguish pretense from profundity; their instinct when faced with something they don’t understand is to ascribe deep significance to it.

Sometimes things can be so subtle they’re imperceptible.

We confound the obscure with the profound.

There are no deeper meanings, only feelings.

Profundity should bring us closer to truth.  Most of what passes for profound moves in the opposite direction.

Ambiguity isn’t profound.  It’s just ambiguous.

We should train our minds as we train our bodies, but it’s much harder.

Metaphysics
It isn’t the world that’s an illusion, but the deeper reality that some are convinced is hidden elsewhere.

We haven’t mastered reality yet and we’re already concerned about virtual reality.

Clinton was on to a metaphysical truth.  We don’t know what is is.

If a tree falls in the desert and no one hears it, does anyone exist?

Brother can you spare a paradigm?

The secret of life?  Life is a treadmill.

We search for truth and find obscurity, so we embrace obscurity and think it’s truth.

I’m confused, therefore I am.

Metaphysics is like theology.  It’s seen to be profound because it professes to answer unanswerable questions.

Philosophy is the attempt to access through logic truths that are either non-existent or inaccessible through reasoning alone.

Politics
Conservatives are those who like things the way they were, or they think they were.

Just say no?  What kind of philosophy of life is that?

Conservatism is the politics of self-interest.

The greatest leaders are those who lead people to restrain their self-interest and emotions.

For a conservative, progress means going back to earlier times.

Plato overlooked an important point.  An aristocracy of intellect can be as self-interested and tyrannical as one of birth,  money or priesthood.

Why should the integrity of nation states be sacrosanct?

When an allegation is characterized as absolutely ridiculous, you can be pretty sure it’s true.

Outrageous remarks, it seems, are always taken out of context.

The most important measure of civilization is compassion, not technology, culture, sophisticated institutions, power or the gross national product.

Extremism isn’t a matter of how far one is from the prevailing middle but of how far one is from a defensible position.

In greed we trust.

They speak of government of laws, not of men.  But who makes the laws?  And who interprets them?

We’ve progressed.  Patriotism is no longer the last refuge of scoundrels.  It’s the first.

The Gestapo were all patriots.

Patriotism is as often a vice as a virtue.

Liberté, Égalité, Sororité

Knowledge and intelligence, however great, are no guaranty of objectivity or impartiality.

A bird in the hand is worth any number of Bushes.

The belief in a perfect society is one of the most destructive ideas concocted by mankind.

Some advice to future Republican administrations: put the supply of combat forces out for competitive bidding; privatize Congress; outsource the Presidency.

Household democracy: one man one vote; one woman one and half votes.

Conservativism is the belief that that good old-time religion should prevail, and that the haves should get to keep all they can lay their hands on.

Conservativism: an unholy alliance of religion and money.

Conservativism brings together the worst human instincts, greed, jingoism, vindictiveness and superstition.

We’ve gone through the me generation; we’re now into the me century.

Liberal means tolerant and generous.  Are these bad things?

Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, you can fool most of the people most of the time.

Bush was caught between Iraq and a hard place.

Is there such a thing as an intellectually honest conservative?  Perhaps, but if so, you can count them on the fingers of less than one hand.

A right winger is someone who loves Jesus but favors the death penalty, pre-emptive war and punishing poor Mexicans for trying to make a decent living.

Conservatives see no contradiction in being pro-life on the one hand and against gun control, in favor of the death penalty, indifferent or hostile to universal health care and war hawks on the other.

Executive privilege is what a President invokes when he or someone who has worked closely with him is lying.

It’s not so sweet to die for one’s country in a pointless war, and most wars are pointless.

“Fiscal conservatives” are those who despise altruism, except where it saves them from having to pay taxes.

The chief difference between liberals and conservatives is that the former are altruistic and compassionate where the latter are mean spirited and punitive.

The best conservatives are those who are cautious about change, prefer prudence to audacity and evolution to revolution, are wary of excessive government and are intellectually honest, but that is a very rare breed.

How civilized a country is can be measured by its willingness to give autonomy or independence to ethnic enclaves.

The Chinese are right.  Before their conquest of Tibet it was dominated by aristocrats and monks who owned the land and treated peasant farmers like serfs.  Now Tibet is dominated by the Chinese government, which owns the land and treats all Tibetans like serfs.

It’s time to put the hens in charge of the foxes’ dens. 

Be careful about voting for the presidential candidate you'd rather have a beer with.  You might end up with suds in the White House.

Sovereignty: the right of nations to abuse their citizens, and claimed citizens, without outside protest.

Neither Hitler nor Stalin were the Antichrist.  They were far too extreme.  Reagan is a much better candidate, seductively preaching selfishness and greed in the name of small government, economic growth and old time religion.

Conservativism is the politics of the tribe.

A spin doctor is just another kind of quack.

Beware of those who wave the flag.  They’re usually waving it for some irrational or self-serving reason.

When our loved ones die in an arguably necessary war, that’s a tragedy.  When they die in an unnecessary one, it’s a crime.

It’s too bad the south didn’t win the civil war.  If it had, we wouldn’t be burdened with Texas.

Conservatives’ belief in trickledown isn’t much different from children’s belief in Santa Claus.


Justice
We’re each determined never to yield to force, yet we always expect others to do so.

Violence tends to escalate, whether perpetrated by those outside the law, or those within it.

Violence is rarely the solution.

The latest euphemism for prison is correctional facility.  Criminalization facility
would be more apt.

Someone in possession of a gram of crack cocaine is a felon.  Someone who brings great harm or even death to thousands through the sale of a legal product is a pillar of society.

We’ve just completed a 30 years war on drugs and are going for 100.

In divorce and the war on drugs we must take care that victory doesn’t do as much harm to the victors as to the vanquished.

What if there were no heaven or hell and no redemption and after we died we spent all eternity experiencing again and again the good we have done others but also the harm and the results of our failures to do good?

Vengeance may be the Lord’s, but we have victim’s rights.

Vengeance is out of fashion.  It’s been replaced by closure.

Think about how to get what you want, not how to punish the person standing in the way of your getting it.

If you can’t make it better, let it go.  Revenge costs time and energy that simply add to the damage

When your mind begins to dwell on the wrong done you, turn your attention to something else.

Criminal justice is an oxymoron for the very poor and the very rich.

The legal profession is more about money than justice.

Religion
I don’t need to be reborn.  I got it right the first time.

God seems to be on the side of the biggest bucks.

The Bible is another of those Rorschach tests.  All see what they fancy in it.

“Theology” is an oxymoron.

Apocalypse is always tomorrow.

Where would the world be without heresy?

One man’s piety is another’s blasphemy.

Morality has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with how you treat your fellow man.

Do you suppose that God cares more about property rights than he does about the well-being of all his creatures?

There are those who are proud of their humility.

If you want to know the meaning of life, look in a dictionary.

It isn’t faith that moves mountains.  It’s earthquakes.

The great mystery of religion is that anyone can believe the doctrines propagated in its name.

The Crusaders may have claimed more victims than the Huns.

The purpose of life is life.

We have a new version of the golden rule; do unto others whatever will do most for you.

Stoicism, Buddhist detachment, piety and altruism are all ways of escaping painful or unsettling feelings.  

Faith without reason is not a social good.

Revealed truth is incompatible with sound social policy. 

Let us not forget that faith is by definition irrational.

If we devoted more attention to ethics and less to religious dogma, the world would be a better place. 

Of the four forms of utopianism that flourished in the 20th century, fundamentalism, communism, fascism and anarchism only fundamentalism continues to thrive in this the 21st.

Faith, piety, chastity and patriotism are all much overrated virtues.

Does God have a penis?

We don’t need the devil to account for evil.  Human nature is explanation enough.

The devil is a convenient excuse for our own worst instincts.

Who is the source of punitive religion, God or the devil?

What kind of god would care how you worshiped him, or even whether you did?

It’s curious that those who still believe lust is a sin more often than not believe that greed no longer is.

Sinners are drawn to Catholicism.  It’s so hospitable to sin.

Worship of a deity is the original cult of personality.

There isn’t one antichrist but many and they aren’t godlike demons but ordinary folk who negate Christ’s message of compassion while professing their love of him.

You can’t love Jesus and hate your fellow man.

When it comes to salvation, only you can save yourself; no one else can save you.

Theology is the rationalization of the irrational.

The most discriminated against minority in America is atheists.

If one god is better than two or more, surely no god is best of all.

Don’t put your trust in leaders who profess to believe in the literal truth of scripture.  These are men who don’t want to be troubled by evidence.

Add priests to a collection of myths and superstitions and you get a religion.

The world would be a better place if men spent more time buggering each other and less shooting, bombing, bashing and skewering.

If you profess your love of Jesus enough, you can get away with just about anything.

The conviction that religious beliefs other than one’s own are false leads to all sorts of strife and mistreatment of one’s fellow humans.

Fundamentalists may say that God is love, but actually they believe he’s hate.

The first principle of ethics: permit no real harm in the name of theological harm.

The religious right is right.  Evolution is supposed to make us better adapted,
but look what’s happening to the American mind.

Some engage in jihads, others conduct crusades.  Let us all instead wage peace.

The world took a big step backward when Christianity and then Islam took to the idea of divinely dictated scripture.

The believers have turned reverence for (human) life into a form of idolatry.

When we win or have good fortune, we praise God.  Why is it we never blame Him when we don’t?

Intelligent design is the philosophy of the planned economy.

Saintliness isn’t a matter of piety or miracles.  It’s a matter of compassion, conviction and courage.

Religion has been good for architecture.

Much harm has been done in the name of that which is deemed sacred.

Would Jesus have voted for George W. Bush?

The secret of life?  Life is a tautology.

It’s clear that man isn’t descended from the monkey.  No monkey is capable of the evils wrought by men.

Beware the undead and the born again.

People aren’t good or bad so much because of what they believe as because of what they feel.

There’s an awful lot that’s unchristian about Christianity.

Let us pray for the Roman Catholics.  May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge that the pope is anything but infallible.

Enlightenment isn’t a total transformation.  It’s a piecemeal, imperfect and never complete process.

I can’t imagine anything more boring than nirvana.

Each of us needs his or her own religion.

When we find there’s no rational answer, we look to mysticism to provide us with one.

Commercialized spirituality is the leading hoax for our time.

I haven’t seen any evidence that the meek will inherit the earth, but maybe the cockroaches.

The only eternal truth is that there are no eternal truths.

The devil is anything but an atheist.

Folly
Man’s stupidity is almost equaled by his intelligence.

For all our mastery of technology, we’re still prey to follies as flagrant as those of any earlier age.

Though our understanding of things biological, mechanical and electronic has increased manyfold, our capacity for self-deception hasn’t diminished one whit.

While we laugh or shudder at others’ follies, we view our own as possessing  the greatest dignity and worth. 

Each age is convinced that its follies represent the highest level of human achievement.

Being a genius doesn’t prevent one from having foolish ideas.

Fashion
People not only don’t mention that the emperor has no clothes, they’ve convinced themselves that it’s not the case, and what’s more think it high fashion.

There are many emperors and many who are blind to their nakedness.

We have trouble remembering that form is not substance.

What’s fashionable today is often seen as ridiculous tomorrow.

Fashion makes fools of us all.

Those who live by fashion die by the same.

Everything is passé in time.

Today’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s old guard.

Today’s blue chip is tomorrow’s recyclable trash.

We live in an age of irony, one of retreat from life.

We adopt irony because we think it puts us above our fellows, but it also makes us less alive.

ars gratia vanitatis

The good word “gay” has been sequestered.   It can no longer be used to  mean lighthearted. We should worry about words the way we worry about endangered species.

The good thing about the rapid pace of change in our times is that few fads last very long.

Let us kick off the shackles of fashion.

Materialism
We think we’re what we accumulate.

Collecting is a poor substitute for creativity.

Diamonds are for people without imagination.

Economic growth is a tiger from which we fear to dismount.

If there were a choice between economic growth and a decent life for all, which would be the better choice?

Affluence will always be with us, we think.  So who cares about the poor?

We’re always chasing after more, but there’s always more to be had.

Enough is never enough.

Machines were made to free us but have made us slaves.

The elimination of poverty is more important than the creation of wealth.  Wealth should be seen as first and foremost a means for ending poverty.

ars gratia commercii

Let’s not forget that greed is a sin.

The trouble with  “the invisible hand” is that you don’t know what it’s up to when you can’t see it.

We have so many possessions in our affluent society that they get lost in the crowd.  We often can’t find them when we want them or don’t even know we have them.

Our lives are consumed by conveniences.

In a consumer society, invention is the mother of necessity.

Man does not live by bread alone.  He also lives by iPods, camera cell phones, Xboxes, LCD HD TVs, SUVs, McMansions and Cancun vacations.

Growth should be a dirty word.

There are many activities in life that are more fulfilling than trying to get the best price.

Today the money changers are no longer just in the temple.  They are the temple.

Too many of us have deep pockets and shallow values.


The Arts
Art criticism is a form of intellectual flatulence.

Innovation in the arts has become hackneyed.

We make up for the rejection of the impressionists by accepting anything as good art as long as it’s new.

If your name is Stein, don’t name your daughter Phyllis.

In art, character and observation are more important than story.  In entertainment it’s the other way around.

Whether a story is good or not isn’t a matter of where it goes but how it gets there.

A thing of beauty is a joy until you get used to it.

Conceptual art: too much concept, too little art.

The avant-garde is no longer the vanguard.  It’s a lost detachment of foot soldiers milling around in a cul-de-sac.

When everything is avant-garde, nothing is avant-garde.

When all art is innovative, innovation becomes boring.

Once an artist demonstrates his brilliance, we see brilliance in whatever he does however nonsensical.

Literature these days suffers from excessive self-consciousness.

Oppression is the mother of literary invention.

If you want something new in literature, you don’t need to resort to stylistic novelty, nonsense or conundrums.  Each and every one of us is different in experience and worldview. 

We’re so obsessed with innovation and originality that we accept any sort of nonsense as long as it’s different from our usual way of saying things.

Writers who have been workshopped have been sawn, assembled, planed, sanded and lacquered.  Is that what we want in our writers?

In the end, fashion is the enemy of art.

Intellectualization is good for analysis but not for art.

The 20th Century was an era of intellectualization of the arts.

Art that tries to create art most often fails.  Art does better when it strives to create reality.

The artful slides all too easily into the arty.

Fashions in art die when they are of interest only to the cognoscenti.

Taste in the arts, like taste in food, is highly personal and ultimately inexplicable.

All good art is at bottom realism.

If I like it, it’s good.  If I don’t, it isn’t.

The hallmark of serious fiction is perspicacious observation of how people behave and what they feel and think.

In the attempt to become more and more significant, the arts are becoming less and less meaningful.

French culture is deathly ill, of too much French culture.

The arts have become avatars of the fashion industry.

Let us kick off the shackles of fashion.

The modernist revolution is no longer a revolution.  It’s the establishment.

Post-modern is more modern than post.

Can’t one remember without alluding to Proust?

Bad wars make good movies.

When an artistic fashion is appreciated by few but the cognoscenti it’s either revolutionary or moribund, usually the latter.

There’s something oxymoronic about an academic degree in creative writing.

The world is full of well-written books that don’t interest me.

The visual arts have descended to the level of the pet rock.

Poetry
Poetry is the art of the implied.

Poetry is as much about what isn’t said as what is.

A poet has to learn to let the reader draw the inference, instead of drawing it for him.

The poet’s role is to reveal things others aren’t aware they’re seeing.

Poetry in its more esoteric forms is like philosophy and religion.  It makes much out of nothing.

Poetry today is in the oracular tradition; the more obscure it is, the more significant it’s seen to be.

We consider some poetry great not despite our inability to understand it but be-cause we can’t understand it.

Poetry is a religion of intellectuals, and would-be intellectuals.

Modern poetry is noteworthy for its obscurity.  Clarity is considered trite.

Few contemporary poets are guilty of  the sin of comprehensibility.

Poetry critics love the cryptic.  It gives them something to interpret.

Poetry today is a sort of intellectual machismo.

I don’t want to have to decipher poetry.  I just want to experience it.

Today everybody is a poets’ poet.  The trouble is that nobody reads them except each other.

The trouble with much poetry today is that it tries too hard to convert emotional experiences into intellectual ones, and succeeds too often.

It’s time to let feeling back into poetry.

I look to be moved by a poem.  I’m not interested in poetry as a purely intellectual exercise.

There’s a notion in poetry circles today that a poem can’t be good if it’s easy to understand.

Many contemporary poets are afraid that if they write clearly, they’ll be rejected by their peers

There’s an arms race among contemporary poets to see who can be the most arcane and solipsistic.

Many contemporary poets think they live in a gated community.  Actually they live in a ghetto, and have locked themselves in.

It’s ironic that T.S. Eliot, one of the high priests of modernism, rejected the modern world.

I’m as much inspired by the poets I don’t like as by those I do.

Poetry is a narcissistic business.

There’s no need for any poem to be obscure.

In poetry it’s difficult to draw a line between substance and style.

Erudition is the curse of contemporary poetry.

When poets become academics, poetry becomes pedantic.

Poetry has become academicized.  It’s fallen down the same hole as sociology and lit crit.

Writing poetry is so popular because it’s the only form of writing in which you’re not likely to be widely criticized for incomprehensibility.

Poetry is a license for serious nonsense.

Some think that poetry has to be incomprehensible to be good.

Some poets hear music in their heads.  In others’ you’ll hear the grinding of gears.

Much of contemporary poetry confuses ambiguity with profundity.

Contemporary poets devote a good deal of intellect to making their work incomprehensible.

Why is it that people think happiness a less suitable subject for poetry than depression?

Poetry is an expression of personality.

It isn’t the form that makes a poem.  It’s the feeling.

Beware the poetry-academic complex.

Poetic language isn’t so much a matter of precision as connotation.

Intellectualization will be the undoing of post-modern poetry, as sentimentality was of romanticism.

Poems are built by accretion, as an oyster builds a pearl.

There’s another world, called poetry.

The poetry is in the details.

Analysis is the enemy of poetry.

Contemporary poetry has gone down the intellectualized path of serial music, the nouvel roman and 20th Century art fads.  It will recede down the path of obscurity with them too.

I don’t believe in interpreting poems.  I believe in enjoying them.

If poetry that can mean something different to every reader is good, isn’t the ultimate poem a blank sheet of paper?

Taste in poetry is like taste in food, essentially arbitrary.

The poetry scene today: great shaggy herds of solipsistic poets and the tedious convolutions of their shaggy minds.

The dominant mode of contemporary poetry is studied incoherence.

We think that a poem we have to interpret is more profound than one whose meaning is evident.

Contemporary poetry seldom delights.  It’s more often a form of forced labor.


Advice
Love people for what they are, not for what you’d like them to be.

Beware of Greeks bearing myths.

Concern yourself with what you can do, not what you can’t.

Resist thinking of an argument as a competition you have to win.

Marry a woman who likes your jokes.

If you speak in code, don’t be surprised if you’re misunderstood.

Never patronize a restaurant advertising fine food, never do business with a company called Done Right and never trust anyone who says trust me.

Shake your fist in dance, not in anger.

Not every problem has a solution.

Indignation is good for you.  It clears the sinuses.

When somebody asks you if you’d like some feedback, say, “No thanks.”  And, if you want to be really polite, you can add after a few moments, “Thank you for not sharing that with me.”

Beware of wisdom.  It can make you pompous.

Distrust gurus.

Etc.
Force is less often the solution than we’re inclined to think.

Icarus wouldn’t have made a very good rocket scientist.

Bombs are careless in their choice of targets.

Today Scrooge would be a yuppie.

Civilization is too often built on the backs of ordinary men.

The grass is often greener on the other side of the street because it’s been painted.

Eden is not a place but a state of mind.

Most adventures are in the mind.

We lavish subsidies on the having of children as if the world were insufficiently populated.

Propagation of the race is the ultimate tautology.

Things are universal in their particularity.

Innovations are seldom as consequential as enthusiasts fancy or doubters fear.

Concern for humankind trumps patriotism any time.

My primary allegiances are to family, friends and the human race.  All others are secondary.

While some prophecies are self-fulfilling, others are self-defeating.

 “Pretentious” is a pretentious word.

We used to have voices in the wilderness.  Now we have voices in cyberspace.

Aphorisms always exaggerate.

Man does not live by efficiency alone.

You may not be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but you can make something that looks an awful lot like one.

Dessert can never be too soon.

There is no demonstrable right or wrong.  There are merely altruism and egoism, compassion and indifference, consistency and inconsistency, self-awareness and self-deception.

If we don’t take sinners seriously as moral philosophers, who’s left?

 “A rose by any other name,” the saying goes, “would smell the same.”  The same is true of turds.

If the devil is in the details, then so is God.

One’s workload expands to exceed the time available for it.

Talking with some people isn’t a dialogue; it’s an interrupted monologue.

Our world is like a dog chasing its tail, the crazy calling the crazy crazy,

Not only are there emperors who have no clothes, but most of them aren’t even emperors. 

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

They say that time is money, but you can make money.  You can’t make time.

There’s magic in the names of birds and butterflies and flowers.  To learn their names we must observe them closely.  Just noticing them won’t do.

There’s magic in names, not magic we can work upon their owners but the magic of things closely observed, for to learn their names it doesn’t suffice to just notice them in a perfunctory manner.

Tomorrow may not be another day.

Some bombs are smarter than others, but they’re all dumb.

It’s dirt poor or filthy rich.  Only the middle class is clean.

Philosophy is a mental rope trick.  One’s conclusions depend on one’s assumptions.

Compassion and generosity are by far the most important virtues.

The most dangerously insane are those who by clinical criteria are sane, the demagogues, the jingoists, the racists, the true believers.

As for capitalism I say, don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Just don’t let it run wild in the barnyard.

I’m no longer into road rage.  Customer service rage has left it in the dust.

Death is a funny fellow, all dressed up like the anti-hero of a Hollywood horror flick.

Death is a poseur.

There are enough real puzzles in the world that no one should feel the need to struggle with contrived ones.

There’s a fine line between logic and sophistry.

“We have zero tolerance” means we used to tolerate it, but we got caught.

If Sisyphus were alive today, he wouldn’t be pushing a rock up a hill.  It would be a lawn mower.

Experience can blind us to what’s happening now.  This is the eternal weakness of military strategizing.

A cow may be sacred, but it’s still a cow.

A man needs a wife to warm his back and a woman a husband.

There is no limit to the new territories one can find, journeying inward.

Yoga is a path to enlightenment, through contortionism.

I grew up in a nuclear family and raised my children in one.  In between there was the threat of nuclear war.  Now that’s all changed.  It’s gone nucular.

Insomnia is my constant companion.  It goes to bed with me like a spouse and is there when I awake.

The difference between the old world and the new is that here in the new world we have all night grocery stores but we don’t have nightingales.

You don’t need to travel far to find the unfamiliar.  You just need to dig a little deeper where you are.

Economists want to quantify everything.  How do you quantify joie de vivre, natural beauty, love?

Reinventing the wheel isn’t a bad idea.  You sometimes come up with a better wheel.