2007 Quotes

“I don't get as much fan mail as an actor or singer would, but when I get a letter 99% of the time it's pointing out something that really had an impact. Like after 'My Own Private Rodeo' all these people wrote to me and said Dale's dad inspired them to come out. And this was when it was still illegal to be gay in Texas and a few other states. Another one that really stuck with me was this girl who survived Columbine. See, "Wings of the Dope," the episode where Luanne's boyfriend comes back as an angel, aired two weeks after the shooting. About a month after that, I got a letter from a girl who was there and hid somewhere in the school when it was all going on. She said the first thing she was gonna do if she survived was tell a friend of hers she was in love with him. She never did. He ended up being one of the kids responsible for it. So you can imagine how - you know, to her, it felt wrong to grieve almost, and she bottled it up. But she saw that episode and Buckley walking away at the end and something just let her finally break down and greive and miss the guy. I remember she quoted Luanne - 'I wonder if he's guardianing some other girl,' or something along that line, because she never had the guts to tell the kid. That really gets to people at Comic Con.”
― Mike Judge

“Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.”
― Mark Gevisser

“Weirdly, D&D didn't encourage my leanings towards trying magic of my own at all. In fact, it frustrated them. Even the most pompous and ambitious historical magicians, from the Zaroastrian Magi through John Dee, Francis Barrett and Aleister Crowley, never claimed to be able to throw fireballs or lightning bolts like D&D wizards can. So D&D was never going to feed the fantasies of practising magic in the real world. That is all about gaining secret knowledge, a higher level of perception or inflicting misfortune or a boon on someone rather than causing a poisonous cloud of vapor to pour from your fingers (Cloudkill, deadly to creatures with less than 5 hit dice, for those who are interested). The game, as we played it, just doesn't support the occult idea of magic.

In fact, it might even be argued that, by giving such a powerful prop to my imagination, D&D stopped me from going deeper into the occult in real life. I certainly had all the qualifications—bullied power-hungry twerp with no discernable skill in conventional fields and no immediate hope of a girlfriend who wasn't mentally ill. It's amazing I'm not out sacrificing goats to this day.”
― Mark Barrowcliffe, The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange

“It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision [in Bush v. Gore]. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is pellucidly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
― John Paul Stevens, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“To invoke alien law when it agrees with one's own thinking, and ignore it otherwise, is not reasoned decisionmaking, but sophistry.”
― Antonin Scalia, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“Mephistopheles' contentious, often ambiguous relationship to Faustus is a reference to tantra just as it is to alchemy. It resembles the shifting tactics of a guru who varies his approach to his pupil in order to dissolve his resistances and prepare him for wider states of consciousness. Both Faustus and the tantric aspirant stimulate and indulge their senses under the guidance of their teachers who encourage them to have sexual encounters with women in their dreams. Both work with magical diagrams or yantras, exhibit extraordinary will, "fly" on visionary journeys, acquire powers of teleportation, invisibility, prophecy, and healing, and have ritual intercourse with women whom they visualize as goddesses. The tantrist [sic] is said to become omniscient as a result of his sacred "marriage," and Faustus produces an omniscient child in his union with the visualized Helen, or Sophia.”
― Ramona Fradon, The Gnostic Faustus

“Yet the freedom of the artist, the pure beauty of nature, and the liberty of each of us to live our lives as we choose are still under threat—and despite all our progress, this threat may be greater now than in many years. The slave religions have used the weapons of fear, guilt, superstition, greed, terror and paranoia to achieve significant gains in political, ideological, and cultural power during recent decades, notably in the forms of militant Islamic fundamentalism and Christian dominionism.

It takes strength to stand in defense of beauty, truth and freedom, and strength requires unity.

Even while we celebrate our diversity and individuality with justified exuberance, it is critical that we remember those principles we hold in common, and those things we owe to each other as brothers and sisters of this, our Holy Order.”
― Sabazius X°, Beauty and Strength: Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference

“I was petrified of making a mistake—head-banging to the wrong song or not hard enough, or thinking a guitar solo was over when it wasn't. A rule of thumb is that if the guitar solo is by Led Zep or Lynyrd Skynyrd then it's not over. Ever.”
― Mark Barrowcliffe, The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange

“In one respect, though, the Court received unfair criticism for Bush v. Gore—from those who said the justices in the majority "stole the election" for Bush. Rather, what the Court did was remove any uncertainty about the outcome. It is possible that if the Court had ruled fairly—or better yet, not taken the case at all—Gore would have won the election. A recount might have led to a Gore victory in Florida. It is also entirely possible that, had the Court acted properly and left the resolution of the election to the Florida courts, Bush would have won anyway. The recount of the 60,000 undervotes might have resulted in Bush's preserving his lead. The Florida legislature, which was controlled by Republicans, might have stepped in and awarded the state's electoral votes to Bush. And if the dispute had wound up in the House of Representatives, which has the constitutional duty to resolve controversies involving the Electoral College, Bush might have won there, too. The tragedy of the Court's performance in the election of 2000 was not that it led to Bush's victory but the inept and unsavory manner with which the justices exercised their power.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote […] task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“Random chance—a freakishly close vote in the single decisive state—gave the Supreme Court the chance to resolve the 2000 presidential election. The character of the justices themselves turned that opportunity into one of the lowest moments in the Court's history. The struggle following the election of 2000 took thirty-six days, and the Court was directly involved for twenty-one of them. Yet over this brief period, the justices displayed all of their worst traits—among them vanity, overconfidence, impatience, arrogance, and simple political partisanship. These three weeks taint an otherwise largely admirable legacy. The justices did almost everything wrong. They embarrassed themselves and the Supreme Court.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“We had to do something [in Bush v. Gore], because countries were laughing at us. France was laughing at us.”
― Antonin Scalia, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“أفكاري تتتئسر جوه ضلوعي
أفراحي تموت تحت دموعي
أقلامي تتكسر ويا طموحي
أوراقي تتحرق وسط شموعي
كلامي يتنطق رغم سكوتي

أحس إن أنا فرحان
إزاي ؟!
والجرح يا هوه ، يا موتي
هربان وجبان
ولا أنا للفرح جعان
مش عارف، مش حاسس،
مش قادر أكون أنا الإنسان
ناسي وحوش
أموالي قروش
طموحاتي فشوش
صهيون بيخون
حياتنا تهون
لو نقدر نتحرر بيها
أرضي بتتاخد
مدرستي معايا بتتعاهد
متسبنيش .... ما تبعنيش
وأنا مش قادر ليها أخون
مش عارف عنها أزود
مش قادر لحدودها أصون
مش قادر لتلاميذها أكون
حامي ،رادع، عنهم مدافع
ويا إخواتي ،وسط حياتي،
مع أحفادي
ضد الصهيون
لو يجتمعوا ، لوا يفتكروا
يوم كان بينا صلاح الدين
ليه نتهان ،ليه نتباع
ليه نستناهم راجعين
ليه ما نكونش أسود قادرين
ليه ما نكونش وحوش عارفين
إن القوة ويا الحكمة
ولو وسط الضلمة
ضد الظلم
تحقق عدل تولد نور
ليه ما أكونش صلاح الدين
ليه ما تكونش بطل حطين
ليه ما نكونش أسود قادرين
ليه مانكونش عرب
متحدين ، منتصرين
وسط ولادنا وجوه بلادنا
نصبح نمسي للراس رافعين”
― عمر حسني

“At the time I thought the winner in an argument was the person who put forward the most logical support for his position. Of course, this isn't true. Human history, from gardening disputes to genocide, is full of examples of people with the most decent, well-argued stance ending up with their face in the mud in front of a naked display of power.”
― Mark Barrowcliffe, The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange

“Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called "ghost marriages." Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a "wedding," and bury the couple together... A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides. Marriage brokers—usually respectable folk who find brides for village men—account for most of the middlemen. At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers—and now murderers.
—"China's Corpse Brides: Wet Goods and Dry Goods" The Economist, July 26, 2007”
― Danica Novgorodoff, The Undertaking of Lily Chen

“There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others.

Abortion was (and is) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“The dilemma facing Bush and the Republicans was clear. If Marshall left, they could not leave the Supreme Court an all-white institution; at the same time, they had to choose a nominee who would stay true to the conservative cause. The list of plausible candidates who fit both qualifications pretty much began and ended with Clarence Thomas.

… There was awkwardness about the selection from the start. "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this," Bush said. "He is the best qualified at this time." The statement was self-evidently preposterous; Thomas had served as a judge for only a year and, before that, displayed few of the customary signs of professional distinction that are the rule for future justices. For example, he had never argued a single case in any federal appeals court, much less in the Supreme Court; he had never written a book, an article, or even a legal brief of any consequence. Worse, Bush's endorsement raised themes that would haunt not only Thomas's confirmation hearings but also his tenure as a justice. Like the contemporary Republican Party as a whole, Bush and Thomas opposed preferential treatment on account of race—and Bush had chosen Thomas in large part because of his race. The contradiction rankled.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“Ľudia, ktorých myšlienky sú nadčasové, zväčša nie sú typicky doboví.”
― Radovan Kavický

“One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“This, since junior school, had been virtually my only experience of women—as fantasy figures. Reading about women in fantasy novels had set me an even more unrealistic point of view. The Lord of the Rings doesn't help, with its sexless visions of elf maidens who may as well be speaking paintings, and neither does other fantasy literature, where women seem to exist solely to be rescued or slept with. The men they want are sorcerer-kings, doomed warriors or deadly assassins. I think the idea that women might fancy good-looking, well-adjusted men who are nice to them is too much for the average fantasy-head to bear.”
― Mark Barrowcliffe, The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange

“Du bisch au ohni Schminki hübsch gnug. 2007”
― Gropi

“Arendt's point is rather that throughout modern German history Jews were pawns, more or less and almost necessarily willing pawns, in the game of power politics. They were used by the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the liberals, and discarded by each of those opposed factions when their usefulness, which was financial, was either used up or no longer deemed socially desirable.”
― Jerome Kohn, The Jewish Writings

“Mitch Montgomery had been dead for nearly nine months.

Those well-meaning souls who’d offered advice after my fiancé’s murder had said that, in time, I would move on with my life. Right now, all I could fathom for my future was joining him.”
― Nancy Barr, Page One: Whiteout