It's not fair! Why is this cold, empty universe, which has bestowed upon us what we so laughingly call life, why is it so barbarically unfair? ...Unfair it is, and that's why we were given brains, to cozen and plan, to circumvent and cheat.

-- Bardo, Neverness, David Zindell

And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers - what he called aleph null - is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that that infinity is embedded within the infinites of the higher alephs, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believed that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god², there must be a god³ and a god⁴, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To assert otherwise is nonsense. And so to assert the existence of the self is therefore a sin, the worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one's tongue than to speak the word "I."

-- Mallory, Neverness, David Zindell

Human thought is really all the same. Thoughts may differ from person to person and group to group, but the way we think is limited by the deep structures of our all too human brains. This is both a curse and a blessing. We are all trapped within the bone coffins of our same brains, imprisoned in thoughtways evolved over a million years. But it is a comfortable prison of white walls, whose air, however stale, we can breathe. If we would escape our prison only for an instant, our new way of seeing, of knowing, would leave us gasping. There would be glories and excruciating beauty and - as I was soon to learn - madness.

-- Mallory, Neverness, David Zindell

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard; a bubbly, thick, stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for the carnival, you dig, and it started as like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He'd go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib, tossing the gags back and forth every time.
Then it developed little teeth, like raspy, incurving hooks, and eating. He thought this was cute at first, and built an act around it, but the ass started eating its way through his pants and started talking on the street, shouting about equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags; nobody loved it, it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time, day and night, you could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up, beating it with his fists, sticking candles up it. Nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him, "It's you who will shut up in the end, not me, because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit."
After that he began waking up in the morning with transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig, all the asshole couldn't do was see, it needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes. And then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out. There was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.

-- Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

A man with one clock always knows what time it is. A man with two clocks is never sure.

-- Space

"A Thanksgiving Prayer"
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeon, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast hordes of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
For decent church-going' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition, and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories -- all right let's see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

-- "A Thanksgiving Prayer", William S. Burroughs

A faith without doubts would be the deadest of faiths, the faith of a person who had no expectations from God.

-- The Unorthodox Murder of Rabbi Wahl, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

"Two thousand years ago," Daniel resumed, "it was the custom in ancient Israel that a cedar tree was planted when a boy was born and a cypress tree was planted when a girl was born. When they grew up and married, their wedding canopy was made of branches woven from both trees.
"Tonight, the canopy under which we stand is not woven from such romantic materials." He looked at the plain white canopy under which the couple stood. "But that ancient Jewish tradition teaches us something very profound. When a couple marry, their relationship is woven together from the experiences and wisdom they've acquired since they were born..."

-- The Unorthodox Murder of Rabbi Wahl, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

If there were no God, there could be no atheists.

-- Sagebrush, on AlaskaMac

If you are not a liberal at 20 then you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative at 40 then you have no mind.

-- Winston Churchill

Truth persuades by teaching, but it does not teach by persuading.

-- Tertullian

One man's religion neither helps or harms another man. It is certainly not part of religion to compel religion.

-- Augustine of Hippo

I tried to find Him on the Christian cross, but He was not there; I went to the Temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere.
I searched on the mountains and in the valleys but neither in the heights nor in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to the Caaba in Mecca, but He was not there either.
I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond their understanding.
I then looked into my heart and it was there where He dwelled that I saw Him; He was nowhere else to be found.

-- Jelaluddin Rami

We now communicate with everyone and say absolutely nothing. We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel and it is a television antenna.

--Ted Koppel

But pointing fingers at movies that fail to be moral is like pointing a finger at a donut that fails to cut paper: it's nice when it happens, but hardly expected.

-- Santos

If you sometimes get discouraged, consider this fellow: he dropped out of grade school, ran a country store, went broke. Took fifteen years to pay off his bills. Took a wife, unhappy marriage. Ran for House, lost twice. Ran for Senate, lost twice. Delivered a speech that became a classic - audience indifferent. Attacked daily by the press and despised by half the country. Despite all this, imagine how many people, all over the world, have been inspired by this awkward, rumpled brooding man, who signed his name, simply - A. Lincoln.

-- Anonymous

You can and will always be you, the same will always go along for me. When you start judging me on who and what you are is when you start to make the slow decent into becoming NORMAL in the most hidious sense of the word. Everybody is an indivudal and should be treated at such in the most spetacular sense of that word. I believe with every impulse and every thought process, with every feeling and everything in me that this world is crying out for some serious healing and respecting every person for what they are, a human being is an excellent place to start.

-- John

Her hand was pale and perhaps a little cold, but the white damask tablecloth brought out the hint of pink at the knuckles and the fingertips, and there was such a soft succulence about the limb that I was seized with the notion of biting into the fleshy bulge of the thenar eminence, of sucking at it, biting deeper until my teeth encountered the gift of fascia and tendons and could go no farther. Is that grotesque? Perhaps it is, for those too squeamish to acknowledge their true natures. If we can be transported with delight by such a vegetarian pleasure as sinking one's teeth into the summer's first peach and feeling the sweet juices overflowing the lips and dripping off one's chin how can we frame the magnitude of pleasure that may flow from devouring a maiden's hand? I cannot believe I am alone.

-- Laszlo Dracula, The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula, Roderick Anscombe

She's taught me the difference between mentally ill and full blown crazy. I'm mentally ill - I know there's a problem, and I work to solve it. She's just crazy.

-- Suzanne Poliquin

If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?

-- bumper sticker

You want to hear God laugh? Make a plan.

-- Michael Hill, in The Enemy Papers, by Barry B. Longyear

"Aydan," spoke Niagat, "I would server Heraak; I would see an end to war; I would be one of your warmasters."
"Would you kill to achieve this, Nigat?"
"I would kill."
"Would you kill Heraak to achieve this?"
"Kill Heraak, my master?" Niagat paused and considered the question. "If I cannot have both, I would see Heraak dead to see an end to war."
"That is not what I asked."
"And, Aydan, I would do the killing."
"And now, would you die to achieve this?"
"I would risk death as does any warrior."
"Again, Niagat, that is not my question. If an end to war can only be purchased at the certain cost of your own life, would you die by your own hand to achieve peace?"
Niagat studied upon the thing that Aydan asked. "I am willing to take the gamble of battle. In this gamble there is the chance of seeing my goal. But my certain death, and by my own hand, there would be no chance of seeing my goal. No. I would not take my own life for this. That would be foolish. Have I passed your test?"
"You have failed, Niagat. Your goal is not peace; your goal is to live in peace. Return when your goal is peace alone and you hold a willing knife at your own throat to achieve it. That is the price of a warmaster's blade."

-- Koda Itheda, Michael Hill, in The Enemy Papers, by Barry B. Longyear

Seeing her in the suits she wore, one never thought of Dagny Taggart's body. The black dress seemed excessively revealing - because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

-- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

"What is morality?" she asked.
"Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?"
The young boy made a sound that was half-chuckle, half-sneer: "Who is John Galt?"

-- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

Did you really think we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken.... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough crimitals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there to that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.

-- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

The real antichrist is the one who takes the wine of an idea and makes it the water of mediocrity.

-- Anonymous

Too bad the Catholic League is so busy picketing good films, like "Dogma," that it can't spare the time to picket bad ones. I'm not in favor of protesting films on the basis of theology, but to picket them because they're boring could be an act of mercy.

-- Roger Ebert

I'm not saying that the church is bad, just that God is better.

-- Kevin Smith

Even crazy people have rights - but not the right to be treated as if they're not crazy.

-- Potshots

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

-- Lyall Watson

Humans can always be counted on to assert, with vigor, their God given right to be stupid.

-- Dean Koontz, Sieze the Night

What is friendship, I wondered, if not a double-faced mirror we hold up between ourselves reflecting those images most pleasing to behold? And when we see images diminished and hardened with the frost of time, and the mirror begins to crack, where is friendship then?

-- Mallory, Neverness, David Zindell

A madman's jerky motions, his aimless words, the wild glint in his eyes - everything he does seems to bubble up from some private well deep within his being. It is a well which spouts actions seemingly beyond his control. And why does a madman appear to have no control? It is because he appears to have no fear; that is, he lacks a certain kind of fear. He is unafraid of embarrassing himself or others with his animal screams and mumbled prophecies. This fearlessness is very threatening to the typical civilized person because he understands, in some portion of his self, that it is only the fear of what otheas think that keeps him from skating naked down the street and howling at the moon when the miseries of life are more than he can bear.

-- Mallory, Neverness, David Zindell

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those you care for to choose for themselves what they will be without any insistence that they satisfy you.

-- Dr. Wayne Dyer

When a woman who has much to say says nothing, her silence can be deafening.

-- King Mongkut, in "Anna and the King"

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

I understood Metallica's plight at first. Their music was being hijacked, goddamn it! But their waning CD sales weren't from Napster, but from the fact that they were like a tough version of Poison; they should have become extinct when the meteor of Alternative hit.

-- Ike, during a Napster debate

Who didn't cringe at Xzibit performing Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" in a 'F*** Napster' shir (I didn't censor that, his actual shirt was censored)? Here was an artist who was as carefully managed and kept as any of the boy bands performing one of the greatest songs ever, in a shirt that went against what Chuck D wanted! Would the 'power' not be those that want to close down a forum like Napster? (His friend on stage was wearing a "I voted for Gore" shirt. How radical you are!)

-- Ike, during a Napster debate

[My reaction] when a music journalist on VH-1 said that the superstar would be lessened down because we would have a choice - Amen! Who cares that Limp Bizkit's 'My Generation' is in the top 50? You can get the best song titled 'My Generation' - The Who's. The ideas presented in The Who's 'My Generation' overshadow every baiting anti-gay, drug supporting lyric that today's group can muster. The Who didn't care if you understood what they said. They'd rather die before they got like you. The end, an explosion of feedback that still hits hard today.

-- Ike, during a Napster debate

Can anyone remember Garth Brooks' whining about used CD sales? Does it strike anyone else as vomitous that a multi-million dollar recording artist, who stood to lose practically nothing from used CD sales, was trotted out as a poster child representing the unfairness of it all, while struggling musicians would give major organs if someone would just consider buying their CD?

-- Buzz Vinyard, during a Napster debate

I have claimed to have faith in God before, but I didn't always realize that faith isn't faith until I can't see the road ahead.

-- Dan Sjoblom

Do illiterate people fully comprehend alphabet soup?

-- vixie83843

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ....'

-- Isaac Asimov

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