BY CLIFF SLATER – Over the years I have collected a number of quotes that I found interesting, provocative, or humorous. You may click on Cliff’s Quotes to see all 41 pages or just enjoy a sampling of six of them below:
“If nothing is your fault, then you have no faults. If anything you do can be explained and justified by forces beyond your control, then there is no reason to control your impulses. After a time, the idea that anything one does can be justified—at least not to anyone but yourself. It does not take long for the values your parents taught to vanish.” Williams, Armstrong. I Feel Good to Be a Black Male. In Washburn, Katherine and John F. Thornton, eds.. Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture. Norton & Co. 1997. pp. 287-8.
“Properly, history shapes the mind into a tool to think with, not to remember with.” Nock, Albert Jay. The Book of Journeyman: Essays from the new FREEMAN. Ayer Company Publishers. 1999. p. 4.
“Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Quoted in Pritchett, Price. New Habits For A Radically Changing World. Pritchett & Associates, Dallas, Texas. 1994.
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” Voltaire quoted in The Cynic’s Lexicon. 1925.
“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.” Gamel Abdel Nasser, Quotes from The Portable Curmudgeon, Jon Winokur ed. New American Library. 1987.
“One of the problems with the market from the standpoint of those who think they are the brightest, the best, and ought to be telling the rest of us groundlings what to do, is that the market allows ordinary people to go out there and make their own decisions. And people who think they have the Truth and the Light don’t want that; they want no part of that. It’s really what they hate most, I think, about a market system.” Sowell, Thomas. Quoted in Voices of Reason Thirty Years of Interviews. Reason Magazine, December 1998.