| 5 April, 2009 |
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The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it. Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people. Muscles come and go; flab lasts. A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug. You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider. Only the winners decide what were war crimes. Wars teach us not to love our enemies but to hate our allies. The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing to people. When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident... or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. To get the attention of a large animal, be it an elephant or a bureaucracy, it helps to know what part of it feels pain. Be very sure, though, that you want its full attention. The wisest mind has something yet to learn. Of all the unbearable nuisances, the ignoramus that has travelled is the worst. There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. He, in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him. No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have - and I think he is a dirty little beast. The enemy came. He was beaten. I am tired. Goodnight. I hate the pollyanna pest who says that all is for the best. Good habits result from resisting temptation. There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel. The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. The only thing I like about rich people is their money. The richer your friends, the more they will cost you. It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people. Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned, for it must be bad. There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist. In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people. If Jerry Brown is the answer, it must be a very peculiar question. Charity sees the need not the cause. Making music should not be left to the professionals. A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home. Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy. There ought to be one day - just one - where there is open season on senators. Nobody said it was going to be easy, and nobody was right. Get this (economic plan) passed. Later on, we can all debate it. The world makes up for all its follies and injustices by being damnably sentimental. It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap. The wine seems to be very closed-in and seems to have entered a dumb stage. Sort of a Marcel Meursault. What profits a man if he keeps his eternal soul when he could have lived life to the full and been forgiven at the end of it all anyway? The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day. Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont. Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. You must have taken great pains, sir; you could not naturally been so very stupid. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. |
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