The Bill of Rights

Amendments I-X of the Constitution of the United States

Random quotes from around the region and nation

"... the geography of the soul transcends physical location."
-- Jonathan Crain in "Richard James: From Queens to Memphis," The Loafer

"[The South]'s like a mythical land where some things are modern, yet some things are just the same as they ever were."
-- Richard James, band leader/musician/singer of The Special Raiders, discussing their new album "Music For People Who Been Wrong(ed)"

"Many people only know two things about honey bees, they make honey and sting. But, honey bees do much more than that. They work together so the colony survives. They make many products such as honey, bees wax and royal jelly. They also are a major pollination source.... The products and work they do is amazing. Being a beekeeper has taught me many important aspects about life.... Being a beekeeper ROCKS!"
-- Michaela Slagle, 13 years-old, Johnson City News & Neighbor "The Spirit of the Community, Volume XI, Issue 8

"There is no failure, only a delay in results."
-- Helen Hadsell, author of Name It and Claim It

"In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a new green flag for Vermont and started selling T-shirts, particularly popular with the state's many tourists, that read, 'U.S. OUT OF VT!' ... Talk of secession has been heating up in Vermont since the early 1990s and even before. In 1991, then-Lt. Gov. Howard Dean moderated debates in seven towns that then voted for secession. That same year, University of Vermont professor and current SVR advisor Frank Bryan argued for secession in a series of well-publicized debates with Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley.... In his manifesto's preface, [Thomas H.] Naylor writes: 'Our nation has truly lost its way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily or environmentally. The Empire has no clothes.' A perennial curmudgeon, Naylor regularly berates government officials. He calls Vermont's elected officials 'enemies of the state' and has labeled six-term Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, 'a world-class prostitute.' ... To most Vermonters, SVR was originally seen as a far-out outfit that engaged in publicity stunts to push secession. At least in the beginning, its most enthusiastic supporters seemed to be the Glover, Vt.-based Bread and Puppet Theater troupe, a merry band dedicated to 'cheap art' whose building hosted SVR's first statewide meeting in October 2003. One SVR attention-grabber was a 'memorial service' held on March 4, 2005, commemorating the day in 1791 that Vermont joined the union. The service included everything from a reading from Ecclesiastes to the strains of Chopin's 'Funeral March.' A funeral procession with a New Orleans-style jazz band carried a flag-draped coffin containing the 'deceased First Vermont Republic' to the State House in Montpelier, where it was placed at the feet of Vermont Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen's statue. SVR even achieved a symbolic political success, persuading the legislature to designate Jan. 16 as Vermont Independence Day to commemorate the establishment of the First Vermont Republic in 1777."
-- AlterNet, June 5, 2008

"One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat."
-- Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

"When everything is falling apart, it is a good sign that everything is about to come together. In the very act of our birthing, we get a lesson for life.... Push on. The breakdown heralds completion.... if you are headed in the right direction, all you need to do is keep on walking...."
-- Henriette Ann Klauser, PhD, Write It Down, Make It Happen

"The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe."
-- Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia (Johnson City News & Neighbor, Volume XI, Issue 8, article by Bill Derby entitled "Did They Say What I Thought They Said.... Chapter II?")

"From your lips to God's ears."
-- middle Eastern expression

"We have the chance to build communities around ideas - to expand the knowledge base, to broaden the conversation. Our challenge, JZ says, is to make sure that we are building monuments of humanity on the Internet."
-- Prof. John Palfrey, lecture notes, Berkman Center for Internet and Society Luncheon Series, from presentation by Jonathan Zittrain on his book The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It

"Eighty percent of uninsured Tennesseans work, and twenty percent have family incomes higher than $40,000."
-- Larry Schmidt, J.C. Downtown Clinic and Project Assist, including the new Pharmacy of Hope, all funded by federal grants, Mountain States Foundation and donations, from churches, particularly, quoted in Johnson City Press

"Zaire is happy and proud to contribute to civilization something strong and original, its Authenticity, in today's world, where ignorance, conflict and selfishness prevail. Man forgets very easily the existence of a value which links us, which is common to us all and thanks to which no one need master either the language or the customs of a given culture to penetrate its depths. I speak of Art.... without the help of men of goodwill, our country would have a difficult time recovering from the systematic looting of our artistic treasures during the colonial period." -- Citoyen Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, President, Republic of Zaire, in the Foreward (Avant-propos) to Art from Zaire (L'art due Zaire, 100 Chefs-d'oeuvre de la Collection Nationale) with text in English and French

"Art is a persistent interpreter of culture, and beyond its sheer beauty, often speaks to the universality of humankind.... We look forward to gaining a better understanding of ourselves, our culture and our own spirituality through [these artist's] work.... Join us as we go 'beyond aesthetics' to address the theme of faith and the diverse ways artists express this theme."
-- Betsy K. White, Director, William King Arts Center, Abingdon VA

"'The Aboriginal way of looking at the world is very sophistocated.' While that worldview is among the earth's oldest, it remains surprisingly relevant. [Storyteller Paul]Taylor characterizes Australia's Aborigines as ancient proponents of environmentalism, and their love of the land permeates the rich myths that he lovingly reconstructs for his American audiences. 'We have a responsibility to look after the land,' he said. 'It is all about caring and custodianship' -- themese that he returns to often in his work. 'I have always been fascinated with indigenous culture and wisdom,' he explained. 'That's really one of the big things I try to impart in my shows -- that we can learn a lot from the old wisdom that is in all of our cultures.'...."
-- Storyteller offers a glimpse of Oz, article announcing Taylor's performance at Jonesborough TN's International Storytelling Center 6/24-/28, from The Loafer magazine, 6/17/08

There are seven emotional traits for aspiration: "unbounded kindness, restraint, harmony, dominance, empathy, foundation, receiving and sharing God's love."
-- Arnold Schwarzbart, artist of Kabbalistic ceramics and carvings/etchings

"The body is borne and destined to be vanquished today or tomorrow, therefore the body is not as important as the soul. One who knows this is actually learned, and for him there is no cause for lamentation, regardless of the condition of the material body."
-- Text 11, explication, Bhagavad-Gita (which calls the civilization of India "the oldest surviving culture in the world"): "The perfection of yoga is to meditate on the Supreme Personality of Godhead within one's heart and make Him the ultimate goal of life."
-- text accompanying Plate 9, Bhagavad-Gita

"These elevated souls live on the moon for about 10,000 years (by demigod calculations) and enjoy life by drinking soma-rasa. They eventually return to earth. This means that on the moon there are higher classes of living beings, though they may not be perceived by the gross senses."
-- Text 25 ("The mystic who passes away from this world during the smoke, the night, the fortnight of the waning moon, or the six months when the sun passes to the south reaches the moon planet but again comes back."), explication. Bhagavad-Gita

"If not for the media's appeals to balance, movement conservatism would have been laughed out of the court of public opinion long ago. And when the press does attempt to dig into the ideological underpinnings of debates about policy and current affairs, it becomes trapped by another form of the media's bipolar disorder. Besides seeing two sides to every issue, they insist on seeing most political battles through the lens of right vs. left. By reporting everything that's happening in American politics through this prism, the media missed the big story: the hijacking of America by the lunatic Right."
-- Right Is Wrong by Arianna Huffington

"Calm down, little brother. Time heals all wounds. No matter how much one is weeping, the moon always follows the sun. Eat your bananas and fresh leaves and don't cry any more, because ever and ever the moon will follow the sun. We thank thee, Lord, for happy hearts, for rain and sunny weather. We thank thee, Lord, for this our food, and that we are together. Amen."
-- grace used before meals at a New Hampshire country commune of college grads

"A grateful mind is a great mind. It eventually attracts every great thing."
-- Plato

"To suggest that black men are raped by their racial condition...presents a more throttling spectacle of black manhood dismembered, embarassed, and dishonored.... The overtly socio-political purpose of castration is conceived as the discipline of all black men (and, secondarily, black women) by punishing one black man (and frequently a woman) publicly."
-- Race, Rape, Castration by Marlon B. Ross

"Having a sense of humor is a key facet in creating greater balance in you life."
-- Karen Cheney

"A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken."
-- James Dent

"The Republican race to replace George W. Bush turned into a competition to see Who Could Be the Biggest Neanderthal. Who would stay in Iraq the longest? Who would cut taxes the deepest? Who would be all right with firing gay Americans from their jobs? Who would jump for joy the highest if Roe v. Wade were reversed? Who would build the biggest fence around America? Who would put an end to stem cell research the fastest? Who would reject evolution most passionately?"
-- Right Is Wrong by ex-Republican Arianna Huffington

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing."
-- Phyllis Diller

"Creative clutter is better than idle neatness." -- Anonymous

"Dull women have immaculate homes."
-- Anonymous

"Dust is a protective coating for fine furniture."
-- Mario Buatta

"Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?"
-- Phyllis Diller

"Housework, if you do it right, can kill you."
-- Erma Bombeck

"I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I write it down on."
-- Anonymous

"[I have] a full-time job -- always a full-time job because, you know, writers don't make any money.... I know a lot of people who had a *lot* of talent, a *lot* of ability, but who didn't continue. Because it's tough. It's *really* tough.... Really, what I see as a kind of antidote to death, to our mortality, is this idea of the fetish item [her latest novel thesis]"
-- Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World

"Chemicals and pesticides that have been banned in the United States are routinely exported to third world countries. Think grapes from Chile or out-of-season exotic fruits and vegetables that we don't grow locally. In addition to human health, we must consider the damage these unregulated pesticides have on the eco-systems and populations of developing countries."
-- new life journal, "Where, Oh Where Has Our Land Gone?" by Elaine Lite, 3/2008

"Since 2003, I'm extremely proud that more than 18,000 acres have been added to the inventory of protected lands in Tennessee. The number of State Natural Areas has increased from 69 to 75, and combined with our 54 State Parks, represent more than 185,000 acres managed by the Department of Environment and Conservation today.... The Heritage Conservation Trust Fund, with $20 million of initial state funding, provides a new mechanism that gives the state added flexibility to work with public and private partners for the conservation and protection of priority tracts across Tennessee.... I am committed to continuing to extend our efforts to protect natural resources, wildlife habitats and places of unique cultural and historic interest...."
-- Governor Phil Bredesen, The Tennessee Conservationist, Nov/Dec 2006

"When you pray, don't forget to move your feet."
-- African adage, quoted in The Tennessee Conservationist, Nov/Dec 2006

"Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment, but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet."
-- Julia Child

"We have seen that in spite of legends no physiological destiny imposes an eternal hostility upon Male and Female as such...."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"It's very isolating to recover from a severe burn injury; the pain requires a great deal of attention and inward focus."
-- Katherine Min, Secondhand World

".... it is to this, the species, that all individuals are subordinated, from the top to the bottom of the scale of animal life."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and move on."
-- Bob Newhart

"You can't change the cards life has dealt you, but you can determine the way you'll play them."
-- Ty Boyd

"Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy."
-- Leo Bascaglia

"Indeed, even with the most extreme bad faith in the world, it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of a rivalry between the human male and female of a truly physiological nature."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing -- but none of them serious."
-- Alan Minter, Boxer (Johnson City News & Neighbor, Volume XI, Issue 8, article by Bill Derby entitled "Did They Say What I Thought They Said.... Chapter II?")

"We may readily agree that her dream of castration has this symbollic significance: she wishes, it is thought, to deprive the male of his transcendence."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"I'd just like to take a moment to thank God, Jesus, the saints, Mary, and my angels for getting me through a tough time in my life. For making it a spiritually strengthening experience."
-- unattributed quotation from Write It Down, Make It Happen by Henriette Ann Klauser, PhD

"The truth is that when one evokes it, one takes for granted that in the timeless realm of Ideas a battle is being waged between those vague essences the Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Masculine."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"We have a Republican Party that continues to back the White House's delusions about Iraq at the expense of our military, our treasure, our safety, and our standing in the world. We have a mainstream on the Right that supports torture, that confirmed an attorney general nominee who is officially agnostic on torture, and that rallies behind a president who refuses to define what the very word 'torture' means. We have a mainstream that supports -- even applauds -- the behavior of thuggish Blackwater mercenaries, that supports the gutting of our civil liberties, that opposes universal health care, and that has views on immigration that wouldn't have been heard outside a John Birch Society meeting ten years ago. It can no longer be denied: The right-wing lunatics are running the Republican asylum, and their madness has infected the entire country and poisoned the world beyond."
-- ex-Republican Arianna Huffington in Right Is Wrong

"Freedom, the independent film shot and produced in southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee last year was named the winner in the Feature Film category at the 2008 Virginia Film Competition held April 26 in Richmond.... based on true events... it chronicles the adventures of Seventh Ohio Cavalry officers Capt. Theodore Allen and Lt. A. A. Carr, who are captured but escape after battle. The two men attempted to return to Union lines by fleeing across East Tennessee with the aid of the Underground Railroad.... Previously, the film won several awards at the 2007 Southern Appalachian International Film Festival including Best Film, Best Director...."
-- A! Magazine for the Arts, June 2008

"Abstract painting is still the primary visual challenge of our time."
-- Michael Goldberg, The Laurel, Asheville VA, February 2008

"Heroes remain, offering us rays of hope, slivers admittedly, but rays of hope nonetheless. The problem is: rays of hope, as hopeful and beautiful as they are, will not save us. Only WE can save us, we the people. But we are asleep at the wheel, and otherwise much too busy working or playing to be bothered with waking up and tending to the looming crisis, which is theatening to rip apart modern civilisation as we know it and reduce it to a pile of rubble. It was a grand party we've had for the last two centuries, fueled by cheap abundant oil, but alas, the party is over. Hang onto your hats, kids, it's going to be a hell of a ride!"
-- Belmont, 8/8/08 AlterNet message board comment on "Bill Moyers: Journalism in Profound Crisis"

"Indeed, the struggle cannot be clearly drawn between them, since woman is opaque in her very being; she stands before man not as a subject but as an object paradoxically endued with subjectivity; she takes herself simultaneously as self and as other, a contradiction that entails baggling consequences."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"Public radio music webcasting is in immediate danger. The recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) exposes public radio stations that stream their musical content to huge increases in royalty payments and threatens to drastically curtail the programming diversity found on public broadcasting websites. This decision treats public broadcasters the same as commercial entities and saddles public radio stations with inappropriate and unachievable requirements.... public radio music webcasting as we know it cannot survive under the new rules."
-- WNCW

"'Life needs to be enjoyed' is the common sentiment of [Rise Phoenix Rise]. With their high-energy live show and 'good-times' attitude, it is not hard to see that they take the idea to heart. Their audience, through constant crowd participation and interaction, easily adopts this philosophy.... Like a phoenix, the five members of this group have risen out of the ashes of several other bands. Those years of blood, sweat, and determination have allowed RPR to develop a tight-knit chemistry that spills over to their relationship with their fans. With a party atmosphere, and songs that stick in your head for hours after the show, Rise Phoenix Rise are turning heads and leaving crowds wanting more."
-- The Loafer

"Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"It's about not being afraid to make mistakes. Anything can lead to new discoveries.... life is about pushing the limits.... It's about moving forward from what's been done.... It is about sharing energy and experience and living within your own balance."
-- Michael Goldberg, The Laurel, Asheville VA, February 2008

"The [Republican] party is in a funk. There is a lack of creativity, very little domestic policy energy."
-- Michael Gerson, ex-speechwriter for Bush Administration

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"
-- Lee Iacocca (Johnson City News & Neighbor, Volume XI, Issue 8, article by Bill Derby entitled "Did They Say What I Thought They Said.... Chapter II?")

"He is teacher, guide, master, healer, priest, king, Rabbi, Guru, and friend."
-- Mary Jane Miles, Christian iconographic artist

"The night, in silence, under many a star;/ The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;/ And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd Death,/ And the body gratefully nestling close to thee."
-- Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd

"Give of yourself with no regard or expectation of receiving anything in return, as the joy of giving will overwhelm you."
-- Hap LeCrone

"Mary is 'the Theotokos,' complete bliss and heavenly joy, piety"
-- Mary Jane Miles, Christian iconographic artist

"The snow outside is a white blanket.... It reminds me of the blank canvas I am trying to allow myself to be these days, the one on which I hope to create, one brush stroke at a time, myself."
-- kelle olyler in untethered, WNC Woman February 2008

"I stopped wantin to be who I was, and began accepting that I was moving toward who I am to become.... Now, I am anxiously awaiting the unfolding of who I am becoming. I am allowing the creation of myself, one brush stroke at a time"
-- kelle olyler in untethered, WNC Woman February 2008

"Sure, there's a lot of me in Elizabeth [the protagonist of the author's novel, In A Dark Season] -- I am, after all, her creator. But there's a lot of Elizabeth that isn't me."
-- vicki lane in so, what do you do?, WNC Woman February 2008

"Were it not for my little jokes, I could not bear the burdens of this office."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"Art is life at its best and worst ... love and loss."
-- Michael Goldberg, The Laurel, Asheville VA, February 2008

"These rites, a giveaway from the Inca shamans of Peru, will assist our transition into the era of peace and prosperity that has been prophesied by the Inca, Hopi and Maya for hundreds of years."
-- victoria johnson in I am the mountain, WNC Woman February 2008

"He [the author's dog Bear] showed me how to let go of upset, forgive immediately and always make love the most important thing to remember."
-- barbara waterhouse, Religious Science Minister for the Center for Creative Living, a Science of Mind Spiritual Community, in the power of commitment, WNC Woman February 2008

"They [men] were just suddenly bombarded with women trying to invade their turf after years of having only to compete with other men. No wonder they got defensive. They were scared to death."
-- canne charters in funny isn't it?, WNC Woman February 2008

"President Bush's statements about children's health shouldn't be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up."
-- Democratic Rep. Pete Stark

"I am no one person. I am a multitude of women."
-- Kathryn Magendie in golden sparkled dancer's cap, WNC Woman February 2008

"My journey of change has delivered me from a crazy family and believing there was something wrong with me into a joyful, embodied woman who loves to dance.... I believe that imagination offers the key to a limitless realm of new realities."
-- Barbara Marlowe in Imagine Possibilities, WNC Woman February 2008

"The woman who is shut up in an immanence endeavors to hold man in that prison also. She sets about mutilating, dominating man, she contradicts him, she denies his truth and his values."
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"I have spent most of my life trying on identities as if I was shopping for a well-fitting pair of jeans.... The concept of identity can be limiting.... When my wallet was stolen, I felt that the person carrying my license was also carrying my identity. The crime felt more personal than what it was, but I still felt violated.... My true identity is an internal matter and has nothing to do with any of my outside traits, possessions or interests.... So I resist clinging to any particular identity, knowing that it will most likely be transient, except for my true identity as an extension of the divine."
-- Kathryn Magendie in golden sparkled dancer's cap, WNC Woman February 2008

"Expressing an emotion meant that she was 'in that time of the month' or even worse 'going through, you know.'"
-- canne charters in funny isn't it?, WNC Woman February 2008

"I honor every woman who has the strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another. I honor all those who step boldly forward in spite of ridicule and criticism, pave a broader way for the women of the next generation."
-- Harriet Hosmer, sculptor

"Why in the world would the terrorists have wanted to get rid of George Bush? He is their chief recruiter: a man who has alienated our allies, isolated us, and united the Muslim world against us."
-- Arianna Huffington in Right Is Wrong

"Until well into the 1960s, blacks who didn't play servants were cut out of films for the southern market."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow

"The concept of 'woman' which fashioned, warped, and destroyed a human being such as Marilyn Monroe... is HIDOUSLY WRONG -- and she, in repudiation of it, in trying tragically to RISE ABOVE IT by killing herself is (in the Shakespearean sense) -- right. Such a life as hers was an affront to her humanity."
-- Lorraine Hansberry

"You will find what is missing after you reclaim, rediscover your own power. All you need is within. Just write."
-- Henriette Ann Klauser, PhD, Write It Down, Make It Happen

"The male professor looks at the woman student knitting in the first row and reminds her that Freud says knitting is a form of masturbation. 'Professor,' the woman answers, 'when I knit, I knit and when I masturbate, I masturbate."
-- apocryphal story told on campuses of women's colleges in the 1950s

"Women's Studies programs and campus feminism groups in the late 1980s and 1990s have nurtured feminist thinking and action about the social conditions under which women learn, especially the problems of sexual harassment and date rape."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow

"The powerful drug Thorazine appeared in 1954 and shifted attention from the tantalizing work of pioneer theorizing the female psyche to the efficacy of the pharmacy in controlling it."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow

"I choose to override my desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below decks."
-- shock-jock Michael Savage's protagonist, Samuel Trueblood, in his novel Vital Signs

"I will be a prayer warrior and I will be ... a witness for God."
-- unattributed

".... prayer is not just supplication, but praise and thanksgiving."
-- Henriette Ann Klauser, PhD, Write It Down, Make It Happen

"Woman, having received from her Creator the same intellectual constitution as man, has the same right as man to intellectual culture and development"
-- Matthew Vassar, founder of Vassar College, 1861

"... this answer belied my own cynacism that the answers from God are just me in an alpha state.... if you have asked for it in prayer-writing, the return is forthcoming.... her unblinking faith did not go unrewarded.... prayer is not just supplication, but praise and thanksgiving... I'd just like to take a moment to thank God, Jesus, the saints, Mary, and my angels for getting me through a tough time in my life. For making it a spiritually strengthening experience."
-- Henriette Ann Klauser, PhD, Write It Down, Make It Happen

"Certain foods it was believed [in the 19th century], especially highly flavored dishes and meats, aroused the sexual appetites. Therefore, girls' diets were regulated to protect them from unhealthy desires. Since protein deprivation was considered a cure for female masturbation, female boarding schools were likely vegetarian."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow

"Let woman be educated to the highest practicable point: not only because it is her right, but because it is essential to the world's progress."
-- Horace Mann, 1853

"In 1961, Charlayne Hunter was the first female black student to enter the University of Georgia in Athens GA with the whole world watching. Two thousand students armed with rocks stoned her dormitory window her first night in residence."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow

"Addressing the packed auditorium, [journalist Bill] Moyers said the work of the media reform movement has 'challenged the stranglehold of mega-media corporations over our press and fostered 'alternative and independent sources of news and information that people can trust.'"
-- "Bill Moyers: Journalism in Profound Crisis," 8/7/08 AlterNet

"Women's participation in New Left politics [in the 1960s] and antiwar activism at college or graduate school -- and their increasing frustration at being allowed to make coffee but not policy -- fueled the movements for women's liberation."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow

"Nothing would induce me to relinquish the advantages of single blessedness."
-- Elizabeth Ordway, on marriage

"Each husband gets the infidelity he deserves."
-- Zelda Popkin in No Crime For A Lady

"I can be smart when it's important, but men don't like it."
-- Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot

"One can survive for only three minutes without oxygen, three hours without insulation from extreme cold, three days without water, and three weeks without food."
-- Richard Cleveland, Founder of Earth School

"... although there is a surfeit of language to represent suffering, there is no ready language available for referencing the experience of pain itself."
-- Race, Rape, Castration by Marlon B. Ross

"This brutalizing impact [of rape and prolonged torture] within the psyche, 'social death' as Orlando Patterson and 'soul death' as Nell Irvin Painter have called it, is impossible to narrate satisfactorily, perhaps even more so than the aching throbs and piercing thrusts of physical pain itself.... Accompanying the felt pain is the unmarked and unmarkable 'wound' upon the mind and spirit inflicted by the pain.... The affliction of psychological injury results not only from serially experienced pain but also and perhaps more intensely from the trauma of not knowing exactly when or how punishments will be meted out."
-- Race, Rape, Castration by Marlon B. Ross

"I've never driven a horse before."
-- Tara Reid (Johnson City News & Neighbor, Volume XI, Issue 8, article by Bill Derby entitled "Did They Say What I Thought They Said.... Chapter II?")

".... What did Goebbels say was the essence of propaganda, of all propaganda? Quote: 'Take a complex topic, reduce it to the point where a very small child could understand it, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.'... U.S. foreign policy is best described as aggressive economic warfare against weak nations, backed up by covert violence and, in the last resort, military invasion - all in order to secure control of other country's natural resources and labor pools. This policy is largely supported by the G8 because it fits their agenda as well.... So, there is nothing 'sad' about the collapse of the American Empire - regardless of the tears of Travis Smiley at National Propaganda Radio - it should be a very joyful occasion, unless your cash flows come off the backs of child slave laborers in China or somewhere similar."
-- non-person comment 8/8/08, on AlterNet message board for "Bill Moyers: Journalism in Profound Crisis"

"... those who engage in political activity, who seek coalition, advocate for or dissent from public policy measures, attempt to construct and nurture 'non-kin affiliations' with others of their various kinds...must be labelled 'abject and degraded' if not outright criminalized...and held back, at all costs, from the gated community where the nice folks face the issues that matter in the only lives worth knowing about...."
-- Getting Up There With Tom by Fred Pfeil

"He treats us like men. He lets us wear earrings."
-- Torrin Polk, University of Houston receiver, on his coach, John Jenkins (Johnson City News & Neighbor, Volume XI, Issue 8, article by Bill Derby entitled "Did They Say What I Thought They Said.... Chapter II?")

"Organized minorities are always more powerful than disorganized majorities."
-- Personal Democracy Forum

"Even more repressed in dominant discourse on race rape is men's fear that the desire to penetrate might invert into the desire to be penetrated, rather than merely the appropriate fear of penetration -- the likelihood that just on the other side of aversion is the lure of the forbidden."
-- Race, Rape, Castration by Marlon B. Ross

"Race rape ... exposes, again unintentionally, the reversible dynamic by which the social norm of aversion can flip into an impulse to attraction, by which the castrating risk of white male supremacy must provoke a fantasy of black men's penile supremacy...."
-- Race, Rape, Castration by Marlon B. Ross

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."
-- Helen Keller