Quotations
Used in the 'WMail' Newsletter
and the Dateline Chamesa blog

Page Four

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
• • “George W. Bush is the worst environmental president in American history.” {Issue #47}
• • “63% of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes [in 2006].”  {blog 10/2007}

Joe Kensil
“Resist the demogogue D.J.T.”  {blog 2/2017}

Muhtar Kent, chairman & CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, 2008-2017
“Coca-Cola is the only business in the world where no matter which country or town or village you are in, if someone asks what do you do,
and you say you work for Coca-Cola, you never have to answer the question, What is that?”  {blog 1/2022}

Donald Keough [1926-2015], president/COO of The Coca-Cola Company, 1981-93
About New Coke, 1985: “Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned
the whole thing. The truth is [that] we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.”  {blog 7/2022}

Beatnik poet Jack Kerouac [1922-69]
• • “Fame is like an old newspaper blowing down Bleecker Street.”  {Issue #30}
• • “Walking on water wasn't built in a day.”  {Issue #56}
• • “Happiness consists in realizing [that] it is all a great strange dream.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”  {blog 9/2011}
• • “I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life,
but that great consciousness of life.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life,
but that great consciousness of life.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything
at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars.” - in "On The Road" [1957 novel]  {blog 4/2024}

American author Jean Kerr [1922-2003]
• • “Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “The real menace in dealing with a 5-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a 5-year-old.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough.
What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”  {blog 12/2011}

playwright & critic Walter Kerr [1913-96]
“He had delusions of adequacy.”  {blog 7/2021}

John Kerry
Massachusetts Lt. Governor, 1983-84; U.S. Senator, 1985-2013; U.S. Secretary of State, 2013-2017
• • “We cannot make . . . progress without raising the wrath of the guardians of the status quo.”  {Issue #40}
• • “How do you ask a [soldier] to be the last man to die for a mistake?” (in 1971)  {Issue #41}
• • “The thought 'power to the people' is not revolutionary: Our country was founded on the concept.” (1971)  {Issue #43}

Ken Kesey [1935-2001]
• • “You can't blame the president for the state of the country. It's always the poets' fault.”  {Issue #18}
• • “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer,
you'll always be seeking . . . The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”  {blog 4/2009}

cartoonist Hank Ketcham [1920-2001]
“Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it but don't swallow it.”   {blog 9/2013}

Charles F. Kettering [1876-1958], founder of Delco, executive at General Motors
• • “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”  {Issue #46}
• • “Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.
I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something [while] sitting down.”  {blog 11/2014}

John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946]
• • “The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces
of time and ignorance, which envelop our future.”  {Issue #22}
• • “The world has been slow to realize that we are in the shadow of one of the greatest
economic catastrophes of modern history.” (quoted by James K. Galbraith
in written testimony to Congress, February 2009)  {blog 5/2009}
• • “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the
currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction,
and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” (in 1919)  {blog 1/2011}
• • “When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.”  {blog 1/2013}
• • “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow
work for the benefit of all.”  {blog 2/2021}

Genghis Khan [1162-1227]
“Violence never settles anything.”  {Issue #45}

lawyer Irene Khan
“There can be no peace without justice and respect for human rights.”  {blog 10/2018}

Callie Khouri
“You get what you settle for.” (in her 1991 screenplay for "Thelma & Louise")  {Issue #70}

Sue Monk Kidd, author of "The Secret Life of Bees" [2001 novel]
“Nothing is accomplished without imagination and bravery.”  {blog 12/2024}

non-fiction writer Tracy Kidder
“In fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility. It has everything to do with those things in nonfiction.
I think that the nonfiction writer's fundamental job is to make what is true believable.”  {blog 2/2017}

Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]
• • “Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action . . . The secret of life is to chatter freely
about all [that] one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented – and then do nothing.”  {Issue #70}
• • “Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.”  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”  {blog 10/2008 & 3/2013}
• • “If you marry, you will regret it; if you don't marry, you will also regret it.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “Whoever has learned to be anxious the right way has learned the ultimate.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “Take away paradox from a thinker and you have a professor.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”  {blog 6/2019}

Kimani M. Kimani
“Endeleya mbele! (Go ahead!)”  {blog 12/2008}

Dennis P. Kimbro
“Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it.”  {blog 10/2016}

King Solomon [circa 990-931 BCE]
“In much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” - in the Judeo-Xian book of Ecclesiastes, 1:18  {blog 2/2021}

Alan King [1927-2004]
“Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.”  {blog 1/2011}

Alexander King [1899-1965]
“Actually, this seems to be the basic need of the human heart in nearly every great crisis – a good hot cup of coffee.”  {blog 5/2016}

blues legend B.B. King [1925-2015]
“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”  {blog 7/2017}

Billie Jean King
“No one changes the world who isn't obsessed.”  {blog 1/2012}

Coretta Scott King [1927-2006]
• • “Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”  {blog 5/2018}
• • “We will never have peace in the world until women take power.”  {blog 6/2019}

Sir David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser
“The threat from global warming is greater than that posed by international terrorism . . . London, New York,
and New Orleans are seriously threatened by melting ice caps.” (in 2004)  {Issue #55}

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotations Page at Working Minds

author Stephen King
• • “It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”  {blog 6/2012}
• • “The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “The most important things are the hardest to say because words diminish them.” – in "On Writing" (2000)  {blog 9/2014}
• • “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”  {blog 4/2018}

Darwin P. Kingsley [1857-1932]
“You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things you never thought you could do. There are no limitations
in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind.”  {blog 11/2012}

Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell
“Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath
this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”  {blog 1/2017}

Barbara Kingsolver
“My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.”  {blog 3/2015}

Baron Neil Gordon Kinnock
“You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.”  {blog 4/2011}

columnist Michael Kinsley
• • “[George W.] Bush is a remarkably successful liar.”  {Issue #36}
• • “The T.E.A. Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration
of what ails America . . . because of the movement's self-indulgent premise that none
of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “Trump [is] a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that
the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.”  {blog 1/2017}

Jarod Kintz
“An empty coffee cup is full of hope. Now there’s something worth voting for.”  {blog 3/2016}

Henry Kipling
“If you wish to learn the art of conversation, I will email it to you.”  {blog 6/2015}

Rudyard Kipling [1865-1936]
• • “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “He travels the fastest who travels alone.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “Four things greater than all things are / Women and horses and power and war.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “San Francisco has only one drawback –'tis hard to leave.”  {blog 2/2016}

John Kircher of Washington, DC
“Donald Trump and the Republicans are creating a tribe of 'Me and Mine' while no longer even recognizing
a democratic society of 'Us and Ours'.” - letter in May 2017 The Atlantic Magazine [est. 1857]  {blog 6/2017}

actress Lisa Kirk [1925-90]
“A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself,
and a brilliant conversationalist is someone who talks to you about yourself.”   {blog 4/2009}

Russell Kirk [1918-94]
“The struggle for freedom is never lost, because it is never won.”  {Issue #57}

Lane Joseph Kirkland, president AFL-CIO, 1980-95
“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”  {Issue #36}

Henry Kissinger
• • “Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.” {Issue #41}
• • “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”  {blog 10/2016}

motivational speaker Robert T. Kiyosaki
• • “Today is the word for winners and tomorrow is the word for losers.”  {blog 10/2018}
• • “By not fully understanding money, the vast majority of people allow the awesome power of money to control them.
The power of money is used against them.”  {blog 10/2022}
• • “Business is a team sport.”  {blog 10/2022}
• • “There is a difference between being poor and being broke. Broke is temporary, and poor is eternal.”  {blog 7/2024}
• • “The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.”  {blog 12/2024}
• • “The main cause of poverty or financial struggle is fear and ignorance, not the economy or the government or the rich.
It’s self-inflicted fear and ignorance that keeps people trapped.”  {blog 12/2024}

Dr. Brian Klaas of London, U.K.
“Stop calling it ‘meddling’. It’s actually information warfare.”  {blog 7/2018}

Stuart Klawans, film critic at The Nation Magazine
• • “Cultural change doesn't require a majority, only an invigorated critical mass.”  {Issue #66}
• • “Film has stopped being central to American life.”, in April 2011  {blog 7/2011}
• • “History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, the second as show business.”  {blog 5/2016}

Joe Klein, TIME Magazine columnist
• • “Barack Obama was elected President because the governing philosophy of the last 30 years,
arrant Reaganism, proved itself bankrupt.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “I feel sorry for future generations that won't have polar bears or coastal cities.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “The art of politics is a honey and baloney sandwich – it is undignified and icky.”  {blog 11/2012}

author Naomi Klein
“The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of wealth – and it looks almost exactly the same.”  {blog 10/2018}

Lisa Kleypas
“This is the smell of June, she wanted to write to Christopher . . . honeysuckle, green hay, wet linen hung out to dry . . .”
- in the 2010 novel "Love In The Afternoon"  {blog 8/2023}

basketball coach Bobby Knight
“The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.”  {blog 12/2012}

film director Travis Knight
“The best films are effectively real life wrapped in metaphor.”  {blog 1/2022}

publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. [1892-1984]
“Life is full of constant sordid surprises. Whenever you do anything for art or the glory of God or friendship or a friend’s memory, you find someone
across the board looking upon it as a business venture. If you’d thought of it in that light, you’d never have gone into it.”  {blog 10/2021}

Donald Knuth
“Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.”  {blog 5/2010}

Edward Irving 'Ed' Koch [1924-2013]
“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.” - quoting John F. Kennedy  {blog 3/2016}

billionaire William I. 'Bill' Koch
“The Koch Industries have a philosophy that profits are above everything else.” - on "60 Minutes"  {blog 8/2014}

Elizabeth Kolbert
“An idea doesn't have to be true, or even especially convincing, to be politically effective.”  {blog 5/2012}

Norman Kolpas
“Donald Trump and every congressman and senator who take campaign donations from the N.R.A. have blood on their hands.”  {blog 12/2018}

fashion designer Michael Kors
“The older I get, the more I realize that the ultimate luxury is time.”  {blog 3/2020}

David Korten
“Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.”   {blog 4/2010}

Alfred Korzybski [1879-1950]
“The map is not the territory.”  {blog 8/2014}

Ernie Kovacs [1919-62]
“Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.”  {Issue #36}

octogenarian Russian activist Sergei Kovalyov
“Law is not an instrument of politics but the other way around.”  {blog 1/2012}

Hilton Kramer
“The past can be neither repeated nor repealed.”  {Issue #36}

physicist Laurence M. Krauss
“The lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It is evidence of a lack of understanding.”  {blog 11/2017}

TV commentator Charles Krauthammer [1950-2018]
“To teach faith as science . . . to impose it on the teaching of evolution
is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.”  {Issue #55}

Jiddu Krishnamurti [1895-1986]
• • “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies,
that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.”  {blog 1/2022 & 4/2024}

reporter Murali Krishnan
“Reading all the books that must be read is like going to the beach and drinking up the ocean.”  {blog 7/2018}

Ray Kroc [1902-84]
who expanded McDonald's, Inc. into a worldwide behemoth
• • “Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”  {blog 11/2015}
• • “That's still a pretty well kept secret, that hard work pays off. They don't tell it, they don't shout it,
they kind of keep it a secret. But I can tell you, with me, it's absolutely proven.”  {blog 10/2016}

Kelly Kronbar
“I hate it when I don't forward a chain letter and I die the next day.”  {blog 9/2012}

Chris Kruger
“In the final analysis, all issues are economic issues.”  {Issue #71}

Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist
• • “The Bush administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in history.”  {Issue #47}
• • “The policy elite . . . are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage
in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “If there’s one piece of economic wisdom [that] I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we
may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.” in January 2011  {blog 1/2011}
• • “Paul Ryan's ['Path To Prosperity'] plan is both ridiculous and cruel.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “The white working class is about to be betrayed.”  {blog 1/2017}
• • “Only two things certain under this administration: death (for the little people) and tax cuts (for the rich).”  {blog 6/2019}

cinema master Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
• • “One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent.”  {blog 8/2012}
• • “The very meaninglessness of life forces man to make his own meaning.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent . . . However vast the darkness,
we must supply our own light.”  {blog 6/2019}

Maggie Kuhn [1905-95], founder of the Gray Panthers
“Old age is not a disease, it is a triumph.”  {blog 12/2011}

Corby Kummer, senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine
“To my mind, pretty much everything besides bread is a dietary supplement.”  {blog 10/2008}

Milan Kundera
• • “The only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate.”  {blog 1/2012}
• • “The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering'. So 'nostalgia' is the suffering caused by
unappeased yearning to return.”  {blog 3/2013}

cinema master Akira Kurosawa [1910-98]
• • “The person who has never seen movies by Satyajit Ray is like a person who has
never seen the moon and the sky.”  {blog 12/2010}
• • “Man is a genius when he is dreaming.”  {blog 11/2022}

Rabbi Harold Kushner
“I think of life as a good book. The further [that] you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.”  {blog 7/2015}

journalist Robert Kuttner
“What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.”  {blog 7/2013}

Pastor Peter Kuzmic of Croatia
“Hope is the ability to hear the melody of the future. Faith is the willingness and the courage to dance to it today.”  {blog 4/2018}

Western author Louis L'Amour [1908-88]
• • “To be a man is to be responsible; it is as simple as that.”  {Issue #28}
• • “Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground,
and later, win a little more.”  {Issue #62}
• • “What good is a newspaper unless it tells the truth and fights for the rights of the people?”  {Issue #64}
• • “The only thing that makes a man able to get along in this world is his brain. A man doesn't have the claws of a bear, nor the strength
of a bull. He doesn't have the nose of a wolf, nor the wings of a hawk, but he has a brain. You're going to get along
in this world as long as you use it.” - in 'Down The Long Hills'  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Every dream has a price.” - in "Sitka" (1957 novel)  {blog 4/2012}
• • “There will come a time when you believe [that] everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “It is better to live one day as a lion, than a dozen years as a sheep.” - in "Flint" (1960 novel)  {blog 8/2014}

fantasy author Madeleine L'Engle [1918-2007]
• • “The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages [that] you've been.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups,
then you write it for children.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness,
leading out into the expanding universe.”  {blog 2/2018}

U.S. Senator Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette  [1855-1925]
• • “Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce
and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.”  {Issue #65}
• • “The solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy.”  {Issue #69}
• • “The usurpation on the part of the Executive of the conduct of foreign relations, which results in Congress
blindly and ignorantly following the course dictated by the President, instead of itself declaring the war
policy, is fundamentally the cause of our being in this war.” (in June 1917)  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy.
It seeks to dominate absolutely.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Democracy is a Life, and requires daily struggle.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “The supreme issue [is] the encroachment of the powerful few on the rights of the many.”  {blog 6/2017}

Native American activist Winona LaDuke
“If states are the laboratory for democracy, [then] Arizona is a meth lab.”
quoting an anonymous educator  {blog 4/2012}

John Laesch, 2008 candidate for Congress in Illinois
“The task of my generation is a separation of corporation and state.”  {blog 10/2007}

Jhumpa Lahiri
“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”  {blog 9/2017}

John Lahr
“If Jesus is a Jew, why does he have a Mexican name?”  {blog 7/2011}

Tasso Lakas
“Everything [that] you own, you rent until you die.”  {blog 12/2017}

activist George Lakey
“Equality isn’t just an ideal. It is a pragmatic economic advantage.”  {blog 7/2016}

Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC
“COVID-19 – and its impact on black and brown communities – is the American empire in viral form.
It lodges itself among the poor and feasts upon them.”  {blog 11/2020}

actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr [1913-2000]
• • “Any girl can look glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”  {blog 1/2012}
• • “All creative people want to do the unexpected.”  {blog 12/2013}

Charles Lamb [1775-1834]
• • “Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.” - in "Essays of Elia" [1823]  {blog 9/2015}
• • “Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see, the world hath more fools in it than ever.”  {blog 8/2023}
• • “I always arrive late at the office. But I make up for it by leaving early.”  {blog 12/2024}

Cody Lambert
“You've got to get the job done, whatever it takes – that's the cowboy way.”  {blog 8/2008}

Sioux shaman John Fire Lame Deer [1903?-76]
“What you see with your eyes shut is what counts.”  {blog 12/2010}

Richard Lamm
“All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail
over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.”  {blog 6/2010}

filmmaker Sara Lamm
“Why can't I say 'What needs doing?' and then go do it?”  {blog 4/2013}

Ned Lamont, 2006 U.S. Senate candidate in Connecticut
“There are 63 lobbyists in Washington, DC for every Congressman.”  {Issue #61}

novelist Anne Lamott
• • “Believing in George Bush is so ludicrous that believing in God seems almost rational.”  {Issue #52}
• • “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that
God hates all the same people you do.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “We must have standards, no matter how low.”  {blog 1/2013}
• • “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “Laughter really is carbonated holiness.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”  {blog 10/2018}
• • “I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up
at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.”  {blog 5/2022}

Leslie Lamport
“A distributed system is one that stops you from getting any work done when a machine
[that] you've never even heard of crashes.”  {blog 6/2010}

inventor Edwin H. Land [1909-91]
“Every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity.”  {blog 11/2015}

Ann Landers {Eppie Lederer 1918-2002}
• • “Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs.”   {blog 12/2011}
• • “No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.”  {blog 12/2018}

John C. Landon
“That's the nice thing about science, you will lose all your paradigms, sooner better than later.”  {blog 2/2019}

Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry [1924-2000]
“Everyone wants to be on a championship team but no one wants to come to practice.”  {blog 8/2018}

Anthony Lane, New Yorker Magazine critic
• • “Cinema deals more fatuously with religion than with any other human enterprise.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “What, O Lord, was the point?”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “Readers should be led into temptation.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “There's a moral here somewhere.”  {blog 8/2014}

Andrew Lang [1844-1912] of Scotland
• • “A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing.” - in 1881  {blog 12/2015}
• • “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts . . . For support rather than illumination.”  {blog 3/2020}

photographer Dorothea Lange [1895-1965]
• • “This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?”  {Issue #68}
• • “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing
than a whole harvest of invention.” - quotation of Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626] tacked to Lange's darkroom door  {blog 8/2014}
• • “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  {blog 4/2016}

Byron J. Langenfeld [1909-96]
“Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales.”  {blog 5/2017}

Dr. J.A. Langford
“The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense.”  {blog 3/2014}

Edward Langley
“What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.”  {Issue #43}

virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier
• • “The moment [that] you feel that you don't have a choice, in anything, you should rebel.”  {blog 7/2024}
• • “It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.”  {blog 7/2024}
• •"There's No Such Thing As Artificial 'Intelligence'" lecture [1:09:54]  {blog 12/2024}

Bert Lantz
“If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”  {Issue #36}

Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu [IVth Century B.C.E.]
• • “To lead the people, walk behind them.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Because of deep love, one is courageous.”  {Issue #36}
• • “Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.” (in the "Tao Te Ching")  {Issue #43}
• • “To see things in the seed, that is genius.”  {Issue #69}
• • “A good traveller has no fixed plans.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”  {blog 2/2011}
• • “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
also “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one tank.”  ~~ ad for gasoline, 2017  {blog 5/2017}
• • “Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “If you correct the mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “When I let go of who I am, I become what I might be.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “If you wish to be out front, then act as if you were behind.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “A leader is best when people barely know [that] he exists; when his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
they will say: we did it ourselves.”  {blog 10/2018}
• • “When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.”  {blog 6/2019}
• • “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace,
you are living in the present.”  {blog 3/2020}
• • “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “Three things I prize and hold fast: Humility, Compassion, and Economy.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.”  {blog 8/2023}
• • “There is no illusion greater than fear.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.”  {blog 4/2024}

Lewis Lapham
“George Bush is a servant of the American oligarchy.”  {Issue #60}

Claude Lapierre
“Real journalism is about presenting the public with facts, not arguments.”   {Issue #67}

Anna Lappé
“Every time [that] you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world [that] you want.”  {blog 4/2014}

U.K. poet Philip Larkin [1922-85]
“Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes.”  {blog 7/2016}

Gene LaRoque, Admiral U.S. Navy [Ret.]
“War has become a spectator sport.”  {Issue #66}

C. Larson
“We must know what we are, before we can know and use what we inherently possess.”  {blog 6/2009}

columnist Doug Larson
“A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.”  {blog 8/2011}

mystery author {pseudonym} Emma Lathen
“Fate is a notorious prankster.”  {Issue #36}

cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder [1908-2004]
“I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.”  {blog 12/2017}

Swiss theologian & poet Johann Kaspar Lavater [1741-1801]
• • “Never say [that] you know a man until you have divided an inheritence with him.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “Mistrust the man who finds everything good, the man who finds everything evil, and still more the man who is indifferent to everything.”  {blog 5/2016}

baseball pitcher Vernon Law
“Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.”  {blog 7/2016}

English writer D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]
• • “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”  {Issue #19}
• • “I am so tired of being told that I want mankind to go back to the condition of savages. As if modern city people weren't the crudest, rawest, most crassly savage monkeys that ever existed, when it comes to the relation of man and woman. All I see in our vaunted civilization is men and women smashing each other emotionally and physically to bits, and all I ask is that they should pause and consider.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.”  {blog 7/2022}

Henry Lawson [1867-1922] of Australia
“Beer makes you feel the way [that] you ought to feel without beer.”  {blog 5/2022}

Edward Lazarus
“Subverting democratic governance requires neither an army nor particular genius,
but simply the concentration of power into the hands of too many true believers.”  {Issue #50}

British author John le Carré [1931-2020]
• • “How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden
to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations tricks in history.”  {Issue #47}
• • “Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with WaterGate, we as the public
are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”  {blog 7/2022}
also attributed to American poet May Sarton [1912-1995]

fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin [1929-2018]
• • “There are no right answers to wrong questions.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place
where you have never been.” - in "The Dispossessed" (1974 novel)  {blog 1/2017}
• • “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “We live in capitalism, its power seems unescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  {blog 10/2018 & 10/2021}
• • “Those who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “Writing is my craft. I honor it deeply. To have a craft, to be able to work at it, is to be honored by it.”  {blog 8/2019}
• • “What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”  {blog 12/2019}
• • “Don't shove me into some pigeonhole, where I don't fit, because I'm all over. My tentacles are coming out of
the pigeonhole in all directions.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “The creative adult is the child who has survived.”  {blog 2/2021}
• • “There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else
the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”  {blog 11/2022}
• • “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something
rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality
of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” - in "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" [1973]  {blog 3/2023}

Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
• • “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “Think for yourself and question authority.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “The universe is an intelligence test.”  {blog 1/2014}

French critic Paul Léautaud [1872-1956]
“Remember that literature was not created to serve life, nor even translate it, but to escape it.”  {blog 3/2023}

Pierce LeBlanc
“Getting to know someone is not a task - it’s an art.”  {blog 3/2017}

Fran Lebowitz
• • “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Food is an important part of a balanced diet.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “Think before you speak. Read before you think.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich person, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man.”  {blog 12/2018}
• • “Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know
anyone as stupid as Donald Trump.”  {blog 5/2020}

Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec [1909-66]
• • “You have to climb to reach a deep thought.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “The first condition of immortality is death.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “He who limps is still walking.”  {blog 12/2013}

fantasy author J.P. Leck
“If the ending is not happy, the story is not finished.” - in "The Strangely Undying" [2014 novel]  {blog 8/2018}

wordmeister Richard Lederer
“There was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.”  {blog 10/2015}

martial artist Bruce Lee [1940-73]
• • “The most dangerous person is one who listens, thinks, and observes.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”  {blog 7/2018}

Gerald Stanley Lee [1862-1944]
“America is a tune. It must be sung together.”  {blog 8/2019}

author (Nelle) Harper Lee, who wrote "To Kill A Mockingbird" [1960]
“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”  {blog 8/2012}

Robert E. Lee [1807-1870]
“Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot
do more. You should never do less.”  {blog 12/2007}

filmmaker Spike Lee
“I ain't Martin Luther King. I don't need a dream. I have a plan.”  {blog 3/2010}

Vincent Lee, on LinkedIn
“If Trump must start a nuclear war, let us finish 'Game of Thrones' first.”  {blog 8/2017}

actor John Leguizamo
“Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.”  {Issue #67}

Dennis Lehane
“The American Way . . . is finding someone to blame.”  {Issue #31}

John Lehman, former U.S. Navy Secretary
“Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.”  {blog 7/2008}

Jean-Pierre Lehmann
“Capitalism has proven itself far superior to socialism in creating wealth and alleviating poverty,
but it has a weakness: The amorality of its most successful practitioners.”  {blog 6/2016}

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [1646-1716]
• • “The present is pregnant with the future.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.”  {blog 7/2021}

Richard Leider
“The Purpose of Life Is To Live A Life of Purpose”  {blog 4/2014}

Laura Leighton
“The lies Trump tells won’t wash the truth away.” - on Facebook  {blog 5/2020}

French filmmaker Claude Lelouch
“I fell in love with cinema because I preferred this life instead of real life.”   {blog 8/2014}

science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem [1921-2006]
“There are no answers, only choices.”  {blog 7/2017}

coach Abe Lemons [1922-2002]
“The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.”  {blog 5/2013}

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin [1870-1924]
• • “Fascism is capitalism in decay.”  {Issue #69 & blog 9/2014}
• • “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  {Issue #69}

rock music legend John Lennon [1940-80]
• • “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”  {blog 10/2009 & 6/2018}
• • “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school,
they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy.' They told me I didn't understand
the assignment, and I told them [that] they didn't understand life.”   {blog 4/2015}
• • “Being honest may not get you many friends, but it will always get you the right ones.”  {blog 9/2016}

Jay Leno
“If God wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates.”  {blog 9/2016}

Annie Leonard
“There is no such thing as 'away'. When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere.”  {blog 8/2013}

Elmore Leonard [1925-2013]
“Face the realities of life with neither fear nor loathing and you'll come out ahead.”  {Issue #28}

entertainer Jack E. Leonard [1910-73]
“There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure.”  {blog 1/2022}

Giacomo Leopardi [1798-1837]
“Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world, since it is experience of life, and
not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”  {blog 6/2012}

pioneer eco-activist Aldo Leopold [1887-1948]
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: What good is it?.”  {blog 6/2016}

Harvard historian Jill Lepore
“Every tyrant from Mao to Perón rules in the name of the people; [this] claim does not lessen their suffering.”  {blog 11/2016}

novelist Ben Lerner
“Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.”  {blog 7/2015}

Lawrence Lessig
“We cannot ignore this corruption anymore. We need a government that works . . . We cannot afford a world
with no sensible reform.” - TED Talk in 2013  {blog 11/2015}

Doris Lessing [1919-2013]
• • “Small things amuse small minds.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything
but the second-best.” – in 'The Golden Notebook' [1962]  {blog 3/2015}
• • “What they didn't realize is that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.”  {blog 3/2016}

David Letterman
• • “God doesn't think everything is funny.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “There is no off position on the genius switch.”  {blog 7/2021}
• • “Next in importance to having a good aim is to recognize when to pull the trigger.”  {blog 10/2021}
• • “As you know, now Rush Limbaugh is the new face of the Republican Party, but they'll probably go with a different body.”  {blog 10/2021}

Bill Leuders, editor at The Progressive Magazine
“[The year] 2020 was singularly awful, with the devastation caused by COVID-19 and the birth of the Big Lie Movement,
led by the disgraced and deranged Donald Trump.”   {blog 1/2022}

Matthew S. Levatich, CEO at Harley Davidson
“Our decision to move some of our operations [off-shore] is 100% based on President Trump's tariffs. Mr. Trump knows nothing
about economics and even less about trade. The man is a moron.”  {blog 6/2018}

TV comedian Sam Levenson [1911-80]
“It's true that nothing is certain except death and taxes. Sometimes I wish that they came in that order.”  {blog 4/2016}

Claude Lévi-Strauss [1908-2009]
“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.”  {blog 1/2010}

right-wing commentator Mark R. Levin
• • “Natural law is superior to, and precedes, political and governmental institutions.”  {blog 12/2024}
• • “This is a very sick man, this Obama.”  {blog 12/2024}

Emmanuel Levinas [1906-95]
“Politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself.”  {Issue #62}

Alex Levine
“Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.”  {blog 2/2017}

Arthur Levitt
Chairman of the American Stock Exchange, 1978-89
Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission, 1993-2001
“The American economy is the eighth wonder of the world; the ninth
is the economic ignorance of the American people.”  {Issue #24}

Michael Z. Lewin
“Beyond a certain amount, money costs too much.”  {blog 6/2012}

Olympic champion Carl Lewis
“If you don't have confidence, you'll alway find a way not to win.”  {blog 4/2013}

British author C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
• • “Can modern man survive the moral collapse of his culture?”  {Issue #8}
• • “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who
torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”  {blog 8/2009}
• • “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough for me.”  {blog 7/2012}
• • “Friendship is born at the moment [that] one person says to another: What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”  {blog 9/2014}
• • “The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me . . . as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things,
one after the other.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “What you see and hear depends a great deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Love is not affectionate feeling but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”  {blog 2/2016}
• • “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”  {blog 4/2017 & 12/2019}
• • “You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “God is easy to please but hard to satisfy.”  {blog 3/2020}
• • “Human history is the long terrible story of humans trying to find something other than God which will make them happy.”  {blog 5/2020}

comedian Jerry Lewis [1926-2017]
“We're leaving [Congress] to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth . . .
or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.”  {blog 8/2017}

comedian Joe E. Lewis [1902-71]
“The way taxes are, you might as well marry for love.”  {blog 4/2016}

Democratic Congressman John Robert Lewis [1940-2020] of Georgia
“Hate is a heavy burden to carry.”  {blog 8/2015}

Sinclair Lewis [1885-1951]
• • “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”  {Issue #56}
• • “It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don't give a damn what you say,
they're going to write.”  {blog 8/2008}
• • “The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying
'The trouble with this country is ...'.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know
[that] she is better than every other country.”  {blog 3/2015}
• • “You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.”  {blog 4/2015}
• • “Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.”  {blog 2/2019}

'Lexington' column in The Economist
“Ideology is just a pejorative word for principles in which you happen not to believe.”  {blog 3/2012}

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg [1742-99]
• • “Question everything.”  {Issue #4}
• • “Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.”  {blog 4/2011}

former U.S. Senator Joseph 'Traitor Joe' Lieberman [1942-2024] of Connecticut
“Republicans think [that] the best way to feed the birds is to give more oats
to the horses: doo-doo economics.”  {Issue #36}

A.J. Liebling [1904-63]
• • “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”  {Issue #46}
• • “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.”  {blog 7/2024}

Grigore Lilian
“Stupidity is not the lack of knowledge, it is the illusion of having it.”  {blog 3/2020 & 8/2023}

John C. Lilly [1915-2001]
“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.”  {blog 7/2016}

Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]
16th President of the United States, 1861-65
Abraham Lincoln Quotations Page at Working Minds
Spirit of America / Presidents / Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln
“The thing about quotes on the internet is that you cannot confirm their validity.”  {blog 9/2014}

Anne Morrow Lindbergh [1906-2001]
• • “For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower from the cliffs of despair.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much.”  {blog 8/2016}

aviator Charles A. Lindbergh [1902-74]
“Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown,
the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.” - in "Autobiography of Values", 1978  {blog 11/2011}

poet & critic Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931]
• • “Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing.” (in 1915)  {blog 9/2009}
• • “In the end, I want you to join my gang. I do not want to join yours.”  {blog 2/2012}

Walter Lippmann [1889-1974]
• • “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The health of society depends upon the quality of the information [that] it receives.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be
presented perfectly and instantly in any one account.”  {blog 12/2008}
• • “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief . . . that the forces which move
the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.”  {blog 12/2015}

Robert Lipsyte
“Becoming the champion is often the luck of the draw, but being a contender, a somebody
with promise, is about hard work and character.”  {blog 5/2010}

Martin Tobias Lithner
“The true essence of intellect lies not merely in its possession, but in its judicious application.”  {blog 4/2024}

Jean Little
“I guess if someone is going to threaten to shoot liberals I’m glad it’s Ted Nugent, he hasn’t had a hit in years.” - on Twitter  {blog 4/2018}

Scottish explorer David Livingston [1813-73]
“I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.”  {blog 11/2012}

Ken Livingston, Mayor of the City of London, U.K.
“I actually think [George W.] Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet.”  {Issue #39}

John Locke [1632-1704]
• • “The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”  {blog 9/2011}
• • “It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.”  {blog 11/2014}

Raymond Loewy [1893-1986]
“Simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation.”  {Issue #39}

artist George Lois
“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”  {blog 2/2016}

Vince Lombardi [1913-70], coached the Green Bay Packers
• • “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”  {Issue #7}
• • “We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”  {blog 4/2014 & 10/2021}
• • “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”  {blog 11/2014}
• • “Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “If you can accept losing, you can't win.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work,
a society work, a civilization work.”  {blog 2/2016}
• • “Success is like anything worthwhile. It has a price. You have to pay the price to win and you have to pay the price
to get to the point where success is possible. Most important, you must pay the price to stay there.”  {blog 7/2017}
• • “The only place where success comes before work is the dictionary.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”  {blog 7/2021}

Airman Hal London, circa 1968
“My life is an ashtray.”  {blog 7/2011}

Jack London [1876-1916]
• • “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”  {blog 9/2011}
• • “The function of man is to live, not to exist.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “Morality is only evidence of low blood pressure.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, [of] playing a poor hand well.”  {blog 11/2020}

Huey Pierce Long, Jr. [1893-1935]
(When asked if fascism could come to America) “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascist.”   {blog 4/2011}

Janet Long
“Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy.”  {blog 5/2010}

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-82]
• • “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.”  {blog 4/2011}

New Mexico State Senator Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
“Nobody in our country should be sick because they are poor, or poor because they are sick.”  {blog 2/2021}

Antonio Lopez
“Just as the world's powers have siezed and exploited the physical territories and natural resources of the Earth,
so too they have colonized the cultural commons – the space of ideas that everyone shares.”  {blog 8/2012}

author Barry Lopez
“The response to tyranny . . . must always be this: Dismantle it.”  {Issue #47 & blog 7/2018}

Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times columnist
• • “Mumia Abu-Jamal is guiltier than O.J.”  {Issue #20}
• • “If 95% of the readers of the Wall Street Journal support a war [against Iraq],
then it's GOT to be a bad idea.”  {Issue #29}
• • “It's about time we admit [that] the Mexican border is now somewhere near Oregon.”  {Issue #40}
• • “Faith, as defined in the year 2004 in America, is freedom from doubt, freedom
from science, freedom from reality.”  {Issue #50}
• • “There are no fresh starts in life, just new opportunities to screw up.”  {blog 2/2014 & 8/2014}

Audre Lorde [1934-92]
“Your silence will not protect you.”  {blog 12/2011}

Italian actress Sophia Loren [b. 1934]
• • “A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Mistakes are part of the dues [that] one pays for a full life.”  {blog 11/2014 & 11/2022}

TV producer Chuck Lorre
“I believe that the Laws of Karma do not apply to show business, where good things happen to bad people on a fairly regular basis.”  {blog 4/2024}

U.S. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi
“We can support the troops without supporting the President.” - in 1998  {Issue #62}

boxer Joe Louis [1914-81]
“You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.”  {blog 6/2008}

H.P. Lovecraft [1890-1937]
“To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.”   {blog 4/2011}

astronaut Jim Lovell
“From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.”  {blog 2/2018}

Samuel Lover [1797-1868]
“Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.”  {blog 11/2016}

Sir John Lubbock [1834-1913]
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water,
or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”  {blog 7/2015}

a.r. lucas
“If there's even a slight chance at getting something that will make you happy, RISK IT. Life's too short and happiness is too rare.”  {blog 7/2017}

Edward Verrall Lucas [1868-1938]
“I am a believer in punctuality, though it makes me very lonely.”  {blog 4/2011}

George Lucas
• • “Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves.
A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “Always remember your focus determines your reality.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “I'm not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living.”  {blog 2/2018}

Clare Boothe Luce [1903-87]
• • “There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown helpless about them.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.”  {blog 3/2017}

Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus [99-55 B.C.E.]
• • “TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT SUADERE MALORUM: Too much religion is apt to encourage evil.”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.”  {blog 8/2019}

Wisconsin journalist Bill Lueders
“Nobody deserves Donald Trump, not even his supporters.”  {blog 1/2017}

Mabel Dodge Luhan [1879-1962]
• • “What is needed is more, more, and always more consciousness, both in art and in life.”  {blog 4/2016}
• • “I wanted to live in a world where a woman could choose her own role in life.”  {blog 5/2016}

New Mexico politician Ben Luján [1935-2012]
“Let us make our time on Earth . . . worthwhile, and do what’s right, and make a difference for the children,
our working families, and our elderly.”  {blog 12/2012}

New Mexico Congressman Ben Ray Luján [Dem NM-03]
• • “As if we needed another reason to kick Republicans out of Congress.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “The disastrous Trumpcare plan [that] Republicans pushed through the House last week makes being a woman a pre-existing condition.”  {blog 5/2017}

Auguste Lumière [1862-1954]
“My invention (the motion picture camera) can be exploited . . . as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that
it has no commercial value whatsoever.”   {blog 8/2015}

XIVth Century philosopher Luo Guanzhong of China
“Success is not worth rejoicing over, failure is not worth grieving over.”  {blog 2/2019}

Martin Luther [1483-1546]
• • “There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “The will alone is always a whore.”  {blog 3/2018}

movie director David Lynch
“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”  {blog 9/2016}

Peter Lynch, Wall Street tycoon
“Never invest in any idea [that] you can't illustrate with a crayon.”  {blog 10/2008}

Irish writer  Robert Wilson Lynd [1879-1949]
“Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them.”  {blog 6/2012}

Benjamin Lytal
“A first novel is like spring lamb, tender and pink.”  {blog 1/2023}

Peter Maass
“Like gravity, [the petroleum industry] influences everything that we do.”
(in "Crude World", 2009)  {blog 2/2010}

Hamilton W. Mabie [1846-1916]
“Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with the wind.”  {blog 12/2019}

Gen. Douglas MacArthur [1880-1964]
“Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.”  {blog 10/2018}

Robert Macauley [1923-2010]
“We can't solve all the problems of the world . . . but that does not absolve us of solving the ones [that] we can.”  {blog 10/2022}

Thomas Macaulay [1800-1859]
“[The Jesuits] appear to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried
without risk of intellectual emancipation.”  {blog 12/2008}

mystery author John D. MacDonald [1916-86]
• • “There is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The worst crimes . . . are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come
to realize this [only] after they are in the nursing home.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “If any two people could ever really get inside each other's head, it would scare the pee out of both of them.”  {blog 11/2016}

mystery author Ross Macdonald [1915-83]
• • “Sex and television are the opium of the people.” - in "The Barbarous Coast", 1956 novel  {blog 6/2011}
• • “There is justice in the truth because they are the same thing.” - in "The Three Roads", 1948  {blog 7/2011}
• • “It is really rather pathetic how simple the big things like love and war seem until you start
to go into detail.” - in "The Three Roads", 1948  {blog 7/2011}

Spanish poet Antonio Machado [1875-1939]
“Traveller, there is no road, you make your own path as you walk.”  {blog 8/2015}

Niccolò Machiavelli [1469-1527]
“Virtue and riches seldom settle on one man.”  {blog 6/2010}

Harvey Mackay
“Someone once said life is hard. I say, compared to what?” {after Sydney J. Harris}  {blog 5/2010}

actress Shirley MacLaine
• • “It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office.”  {blog 12/2012}
• • “The most profound relationship [that] we'll ever have is the one with ourselves.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.”  {blog 9/2017}

Norman Maclean [1902-90]
“All good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art
and art does not come easy.”  {blog 5/2009}

American poet Archibald Macleish [1892-1982]
“Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into
thinking [that] we have all the answers for everybody else.”  {blog 12/2018}

Harold MacMillan [1894-1986]
“A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man [that] nobody trusts.”  {blog 3/2013}

TV news anchor Rachel Maddow
• • “Republicans have been pointing out that the Democratic [Party] platform contains no mention of God. Neither does the U.S. Constitution.”  {blog 12/2018}
• • “I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet.”  {blog 12/2024}

comedian Kathleen Madigan
“I’d like to have kids. I get those maternal feelings. Like when I’m laying on the couch and I can’t reach the remote control.”  {blog 7/2018}

James A. Madison [1751-1836]
fourth President of The United States, 1809-17
• • “Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance;
and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist
in greater purity the less [that] they are mixed together.”  {in 'Letter to Edward Livingston', 10 July 1822}  {Issue #58}
• • “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”  {Issue #59}
• • “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves
with the power which knowledge gives.” (in 1822)  {blog 8/2009}
• • “History shows that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain control
over governments by controlling the money and the issuance of it.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “The growing wealth acquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places,
pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”, in 1785  {blog 3/2014}
• • “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible
to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”  {blog 2/2016 & 5/2022}
• • “All men with power must be distrusted to a degree.”  {blog 5/2022}

rock star Madonna
• • “A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “Poor is the man whose pleasure depends on the permission of another.”  {blog 4/2016}

Maurice Maeterlinck [1862-1949]
“The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion [that]
Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island.”  {blog 10/2008}

Iranian-American author Tahereh Mafi
“I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.”  {blog 7/2017}

Mr. Edward Magorium character, as written by Zach Helm
“37 seconds well used is a lifetime!”  {blog 11/2008}

guru Nisargadatta Maharaj [1897-1981] of India
“The steady resistance to the unnecessary is the secret of success.”  {blog 7/2017}

Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi [1879-1950] of Tamil Nadu, India
“Q: How are we to treat others? A: There are no others.”  {blog 12/2018}

TV talk show host Bill Maher
• • “What's good for comedy is bad for America.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “When a hooker blows a politician it puts a lobbyist out of work.” - in February 2017  {blog 1/2018}
• • “If we really think children are our future, shouldn’t the people who mold their minds make more than the night manager at GameStop?”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “Looks like they're gonna do it, Kavanaugh on the court: women of America, consider yourself boofed.”  {blog 10/2018}

Nobel-laureate Naguib Mahfouz [1911-2006]
“April. Month of dust and lies.”  {blog 5/2022}

composer Gustav Mahler [1860-1911]
“Tradition is tending the flame, it's not worshiping the ashes.”   {blog 5/2012}

Alan Maiccon
“Common leaders become successful. Remarkable leaders leave a legacy.”  {blog 10/2022}

Norman Mailer [1923-2007]
“I think it’s bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act.
It discharges the tension.”  {blog 8/2011}

Maimonides [1135-1204]
“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”  {blog 10/2012}

Janet Maker of Los Angeles, California
“True believers are always wrong, whether they are Christians, Muslims, or Jews.”  {blog 9/2008}

French poet Stéphane Mallarmé [1842-98]
“There is nothing but beauty – and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.”  {blog 3/2014}

radio talk show host Mike Malloy
• • “Taking no action at all is itself an immoral act.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Anyone who has Republican parents should run away from home.”  {blog 4/2010}

Dudley Field Malone [1882-1950]
“I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.”   {blog 4/2014}

David Mamet
“The definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.”  {blog 7/2013}

South African statesman Nelson Mandela [1918-2013]
• • “To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances
the freedom of others.”  {blog 9/2012 & 7/2018}
• • “There is no passion to be found in playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one
[that] you are capable of living.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”  {blog 1/2014}
• • “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”  {blog 2/2014}
• • “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time [that] you fall.”  {blog 3/2014}
• • “Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed
by the actions of human beings.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “Forgiveness liberates the soul; it removes fear. That is why it is such a powerful weapon.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “I never fail. I either win or learn.”  {blog 12/2017}
• • “The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by
how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”  {blog 6/2019}
• • “Fools multiply, when wise men are silent.”  {blog 11/2020}
• • “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”  {blog 7/2024}

Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller [1945-2010]
“The secret of our success is that we never, never give up.”  {blog 12/2017}

journalist Farhad Manjoo
“Everyone's a socialist in a pandemic.”  {blog 3/2020}

Heinrich Mann [1871-1950]
“A house without books is like a room without windows.”  {blog 6/2011}

Horace Mann [1796-1859]
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”  {Issue #38}

actor Terrence Mann
“Movies will make you famous; television will make you rich; but theatre will make you good.”  {blog 3/2023}

Thomas Mann [1875-1955]
• • “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”  {blog 4/2008}
• • “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”  {blog 10/2011}
• • “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”  {blog 12/2012}
• • “Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course [that] it takes for us be called a 'happy' one?”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory.”  {blog 9/2016}

football great Peyton Manning
“Pressure is something [that] you feel when you don't know what you're doing.”  {blog 11/2013}

Katherine Mansfield [1888-1923]
“Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others . . . Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”
– journal entry for 14 October 1922 in "Journal of Katherine Mansfield" (1927)  {blog 6/2016}

motivational speaker Dr. Steve Maraboli
• • “Be open enough to see opportunities. Be wide enough to be grateful. Be courageous enough to be happy.”  {blog 4/2018}
• • “Your fear is 100% dependent on you for its survival.”  {blog 5/2018}

Sándor Márai [1900-89]
“There are only two divine medicaments to help us bear the poison of reality and prevent it
from killing us prematurely and these are intelligence and indifference.”  {Issue #57}

March Hare character, as written by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) [1832-98]
“If you don't think, then you shouldn't talk.”  {blog 6/2016}

Richard 'Dick' Marcinko
“The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.”  {blog 12/2017}

Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979]
“The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hifi set,
split-level home, kitchen equipment.”   {blog 12/2013}

Harry Margolis
“You've got to give up being a little son of a bitch.”  {blog 5/2008}

Joshua J. Marine
“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”  {blog 12/2017}

Jacques Maritain [1882-1973]
“Never take stupidity too much in earnest.” – a 'Chinese proverb' that he invented  {blog 12/2008}

poet Edwin Markham [1852-1940]
“Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”  {blog 2/2019}

Swedish author Liza Marklund
“There'll never be any revolution. Humanity has bartered it for Coca-Cola and cable television.”  {blog 7/2022}

movie producer Christopher Markus
“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”  {blog 1/2023}

Jamaican musician Ziggy Marley
“When the sun shines, it shines for everyone.”  {blog 6/2017}

Christopher Marlowe [1564-93]
“Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.”  {Issue #71}

Gabriel García Márquez [1927-2014]
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”  {blog 4/2013}

Don Marquis [1878-1937]
• • “An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”  {blog 3/2008}
• • “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.”  {blog 6/2017}

Dame Ngaio Marsh [1895-1982]
“No art should be fashionable.”  {Issue #43}

John Marshall [1755-1835]
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1801-1835
“Sometimes integrity is the subtlest and most effective strategy of all.”  {blog 5/2013}

Penny Marshall
“At a certain age, it's better to look up than down.”  {blog 10/2012}

Thomas R. Marshall [1854-1925]
“What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”  {blog 2/2009}

Trevor Marshall
“It's not . . . how you play the game, but how you design the playing field.” - in 1988  {blog 10/2009}

abstract painter Agnes Martin [1912-2004]
“Live life as a verb, not as a noun.”  {blog 8/2023}

sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin
• • “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”  {blog 8/2016}
• • “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone – if it is to keep its edge.”  {blog 10/2016}
• • “I believe in steel swords, gold coins, and man's wits ... And I believe [that] there once were dragons. I've seen their skulls, after all.”   {blog 7/2021}
• • “I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves. I have walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”  {blog 10/2021}

entertainer Steve Martin
• • “I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “If you're studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember
just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.”  {blog 11/2020}
• • “I'm not into that one night thing. I think a person should get to know someone and even be in love with them
before you use and degrade them.”  {blog 1/2022}
• • “That's part of your problem: you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.”  {blog 1/2022}
~~ {as Davis} in the movie "Grand Canyon" [1991]

Al Martinez [1929-2015]
Los Angeles Times columnist, 1984-2009
• • “There's a people's war brewing against greed and excess, against the disparity between the haves and the have-nots,
and we'd better start taking it seriously.” (Oct 2003)   {Issue #36}
• • “The Republican Party [parades] God thru town like a circus elephant, shouting loudly that it is for Him
that they are attempting to unite America in a great crusade for family values.” (2004)  {Issue #41}
• • “We are a culture in freefall.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Our vice president, Dick Cheney . . . is a man without either wisdom or conscience.”  {Issue #47}
• • “There is no better way to make a bad thing worse than
to call out a government agency.”  {Issue #48}
• • “Love, by its very nature, is the sum of all emotions, from joy to despair.”  {Issue #48}

Ernesto Martinez, on Facebook
“The Sweet Baby Jesus gave his life on the Cross so that Retailers Worldwide could end the fiscal year with strong 4th quarter earnings and consumers
could start the New Year in Debt up to their eyeballs, thus guaranteeing perpetual Slavery for all of us and Prosperity for the top 1%.”  {blog 12/2017}

author Steve Martini
• • “Throughout history, truth has withered and died of loneliness.”  {Issue #33}
• • “Politicians in [California] don't accept reasoned argument, and they don't take American Express.”  {Issue #36}
• • “[C]orporate management getting rich while their companies go broke is just part of the normal business cycle . . .
A lot of money in America is still made the old-fashioned way – by stealing it.”  {Issue #49}

Groucho Marx [1890-1977]
• • “I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on,
I go to the library and read a good book.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, misdiagnosing it, and then applying the wrong remedies.”{blog 4/2009 & 4/2012}
• • “Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.”  {blog 9/2009}
• • “A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”  {blog 4/2013}
• • “These are my values. And if you don't like them, I have others.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “There's one way to find out if a man is honest. Ask him. If he says 'yes', you know he is a crook.”  {blog 11/2016}
• • “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.”  {blog 3/2020}

Karl Marx [1818-83]
• • “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however, is to change it.”  {Issue #49}
• • “Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, [and] you ruin a wonderful
business opportunity.”  {blog 3/2010} — double-checked 2017: Karl Marx did say this
• • {last words} “Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough already.”  {blog 9/2013}
• • “Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.” - in "The Communist Manifesto" [1848]  {blog 2/2016}

Alj Mary of Phoenix, Arizona
“There are times when you just have to p*ss off everybody in order to get something constructive done.”  {blog 11/2007}

John Masefield [1878-1967]
“All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.”  {blog 1/2022}
~~ from the poem "Sea-Fever" [1916]

Abraham Maslow [1908-70]
• • “When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “The good society is one in which virtue pays.”  {blog 6/2017}

U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto [Dem-NV]
“¡La lucha sigue! The fight continues!”  {blog 10/2017}

Barbara Mathieson
“If corporations are people, I demand to see Monsanto's birth certificate.”  {blog 10/2016}

novelist Ayana Mathis
“Joy, it must be remembered, is nothing like happiness, its milquetoast cousin. It is instead a vivid and extreme
state of being, often arrived at in the aftermath of great pain.”  {blog 4/2016}

Matilda character, written by Roald Dahl [1916-90]
“Reading . . . it's like a holiday in your head . . .” - in the "Matilda" musical movie [2022]  {blog 12/2023}

French artist Henri Matisse [1869-1954]
• • He warned his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he married in 1898, when he was twenty-eight,
“I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.”   {blog 1/2022}
• • “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”  {blog 7/2022}

Gen. James Mattis, the former defense secretary
“The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters
are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand - one that all of us should be able to get behind.”  {blog 11/2020}

don Juan Matus (as documented by Carlos Castañeda [1925-98])
• • “The purpose of life is to learn.”  {Issue #6}
• • “Death is always just over your left shoulder.”  {Issue #42}
• • “Nothing in the world is a gift. Whatever there is to learn
has to be learned the hard way.”  {Issue #48}

W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]
• • “Luck is a talent.”  {Issue #36}
• • “If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom.”  {Issue #47}
• • “It's a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”  {Issue #49}
• • “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character. Happiness does that sometimes;
but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “The ability to quote is a servicable substitute for wit.”  {blog 1/2017}
• • “The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”  {blog 1/2018}
• • “Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.”  {blog 2/2018}

André Maurois [1885-1967]
• • “Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “The value of the average conversation could be enormously improved by the constant
use of four simple words: 'I do not know'.”  {blog 5/2010}
• • “Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.”  {blog 5/2012}

Maxine in Santa Fe, New Mexico
“There is nothing that is always or never.”  {blog 7/2012}

hostess Elsa Maxwell [1883-1963]
“Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank,
but never to being bores.”  {blog 11/2012}

John C. Maxwell
• • “People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.”  {blog 9/2017}
• • “The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.”  {blog 7/2018}

educator Dr. Kevin Maxwell
“Our job is to teach the students [that] we have. Not the ones [that] we would like to have. Not the ones [that] we used to have.
Those we have right now. All of them.”  {blog 5/2017}

motivational speaker Katrina Mayer
“When you truly love your journey, the destination is just a bonus.”  {blog 1/2017}

Andrew McAfee, author of "Enterprise 2.0"
“Never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.”  {blog 3/2014}

trainer Joe McAuliffe
“If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.”  {blog 10/2016}

U.S. Senator John McCain [1936-2018] of Arizona
• • “Global warming has to become a campaign issue, and it never has, either in congressional campaigns
or senatorial campaigns or presidential campaigns.”  {Issue #60}
• • “Today's press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”  {blog 7/2018}
• • “I wish all of you great adventures, good company, and lives as lucky as mine.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that
encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”  {blog 8/2018}

Cormac McCarthy
“It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else
they'd have no heart to start at all.”  {blog 5/2013}

Mary McCarthy [1912-89]
“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”  {blog 5/2013}

G.O.P. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
“I wish we had been able to obstruct more.” (in August 2010)  {blog 10/2010}

David McCord [1897-1997]
“Books fall open, you fall in.”  {blog 3/2016}

Carson McCullers [1917-67]
“The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.”  {blog 6/2015}

Johnston McCulley [1883-1958], creator of 'El Zorro'
• • “Existence is a tough proposition, and a man has to possess fortitude to endure it.”  {Issue #46 & blog 8/2012}
• • “To steal from a thief is not theft. It is merely irony.”  {blog 8/2012}

Brooke McEldowney
“The thing that truly sets people apart from other animals is not their thought process,
but their ability to congratulate themselves for having one.”  {Issue #51}

tennis pro John McEnroe
“We all choke. Winners know how to handle choking better than losers.”  {blog 8/2012}

Reba McEntire
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone.”  {blog 3/2013}

Congressman Louis Thomas McFadden [1876-1936]
“The Federal Reserve [Banks] are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.
There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run
by the International Bankers.” (circa 1933)  {blog 11/2009}

Margaret McFarland [1905-88], lifelong collaborator of children's TV host Fred 'Mister' Rogers [1928-2003]
“Anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.”  {blog 12/2019}

Bryant McGill
“There is nothing higher-class than real craftmanship, diversity, originality, and the service of skilled human hands.”  {blog 2/2016}

George McGovern [1922-2012]
“Sometimes when they say [that] you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying
[that] you have a real bad sense of timing.”  {blog 11/2012}

Mary McGrory [1918-2004]
“Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.”  {blog 10/2015}

syndicated cartoonist Aaron McGruder
“Oppression reigns unchecked throughout most of the world.”  {Issue #24}

basketball announcer Al McGuire [1928-2001]
“The world is run by C students.”  {blog 12/2008}

Peter T. McIntyre
“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”  {blog 2/2009}

ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna [1946-2000]
“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the
Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp [that] it was written on.”  {blog 4/2018}

eco-journalist Bill McKibben
• • “When we talk about alternative energy, there’s solar, and there’s wind. And there’s Bernie Sanders.”  {blog 12/2015}
• • “When confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit [that] we can muster, and if we can do so
without losing the civility that makes life enjoyable, then so much the better.” in the epilogue to new book "Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance"  {blog 12/2017}
• • “Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “Adapt to that which you can't prevent. Prevent that to which you can't adapt.”  {blog 9/2018}
• • “If we're serious about preventing catastrophic warming, we can't dig any new coal mines, drill any new fields, build any more
pipelines. Not a single one.”  {blog 10/2018}
• • “Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger
is our movement to stop it.”  {blog 5/2020}

poet-songwriter Rod McKuen [1933-2015]
“It doesn't matter who you love, or how you love, but that you love.”  {Issue #43}

journalist Mignon McLaughlin [1913-83]
• • “No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.”  {blog 12/2011}

Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan [1911-80]
• • “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate
than by the content of the communication.”  {Issue #36}
• • “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”  {blog 11/2013}
~~ phrase coined in the 1960s by McLuhan and popularized by Dr. Timothy Leary [1920-96]
• • “Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”  {blog 3/2018}
• • “Advertising is the greatest art form of the XXth Century.”  {blog 2/2019}

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
“You have zero privacy . . . Get over it.” (in 1999)  {blog 7/2010}

writer John McPhee
“Science erases what was previously true.” – in 1967  {blog 7/2016}

actress Butterfly McQueen [1911-95]
“Beautiful young people are random acts of nature, but beautiful old people are
deliberate works of art.”  {blog 4/2009}

Margaret Mead [1901-78]
• • “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”  {Issue #24}
• • “It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “It is cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age,
and all the regrets into old age.”  {blog 5/2012}
• • “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”  {blog 4/2017}

Muffy Mead-Ferro of Salt Lake City, Utah
“We're dangerously close to becoming an entire nation of Howard Hugheses.”  {Issue #52}

Native American activist Russell Means [1939-2012]
“Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution.”  {blog 9/2017}

George Meany [1894-1980], president AFL-CIO 1955-79
“You don't own it until it costs you something.”  {Issue #36}

Golda Meir [1898-1978]
• • “There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others
to kill. It's exactly the same thing.”  {blog 2/2008}
• • “Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.”  {blog 3/2014}

physicist Lise Meitner [1878-1968]
“Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.”  {blog 6/2010}

independent filmmaker Jonas Mekas [1922-2019]
“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”  {blog 8/2023}

J. Reid Meloy
“Monitor your own narcissism.”  {blog 6/2016}

Glennon Doyle Melton
“You will be too much for some people. Those aren't your people.”  {blog 9/2018}

economist Allan H. Meltzer
“Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn't work.”  {blog 11/2009 & 1/2012}

radio host Bernard Meltzer [1916-98]
“A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.”  {blog 3/2018}

Herman Melville [1819-91]
• • “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these
sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”  {blog 7/2024}

Greek playwright Menander [342-292 B.C.E.]
“The character of a man is known from his conversations.”  {blog 10/2022}

Chinese philosopher Mencius (Mengzi) [372-289 BCE]
“Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous.”  {blog 9/2016}

H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]
H.L. Mencken Quotations Page at Working Minds
H.L. Mencken Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

mystery author D.R. Meredith of Amarillo, Texas
• • “The road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with self-justification.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “Nothing in this life happens without a before and after.”  {blog 4/2009}
• • “What are games but life reduced to symbolic rituals.”  {blog 3/2016}

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany
“Fear has never been a good advisor, neither in our personal lives nor in our society.”  {blog 12/2015}

Tyler Merritt
“I don't hate Trump. I pray for him.”  {blog 6/2018}

Thomas Merton [1915-68]
• • “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “You are made in the image of what you desire.”  {blog 10/2011}

French outlaw Jacques Mesrine [1936-79]
“Death is nothing to someone who knew how to live.”  {blog 1/2011}

Kritter Metimbers, on Facebook
“Republicans are essentially 14 year olds.”  {blog 3/2020}

Harold Meyerson
• • “When it comes to losing jobs and failing to balance a budget, George W. Bush is the club champion; indeed, his stewardship of
the American economy is beginning to rival Herbert Hoover's for sheer perverse, long-term ineptitude.”  (Sept 2003)  {Issue #36}
• • “[George W.] Bush combines at the highest levels the qualities of plutocrat and philistine.”  {Issue #40}
• • “The president is only a liar; the vice president is a lunatic.” (2004)  {Issue #47}

French anthropologist Régis Meyran
“We cannot be 'for' or 'against' [artificial intelligence technology], insofar as it is already here and not likely to disappear any time soon.”  {blog 7/2021}

bookseller Lewis Micheaux [1885-1976]
• • “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”
in "The Black Power Mixtape" docufilm [2011]  {blog 3/2012}
• • “The only lord I know, is the landlord.”  {blog 4/2012}

pioneer Afro-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux [1884-1951]
• • “One of the greatest tasks of my life has been to teach that the colored man can be anything.”   {blog 1/2010}
• • “Your self image is so powerful [that] it unwittingly becomes your destiny.”  {blog 5/2015}

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni [1475-1564]
• • “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “I am still learning.” - at age 87  {blog 10/2016}

author James A. Michener [1907-97]
• • “If our major parties do not know where the boundaries of decency
and acceptance are, then we are already lost.”  {Issue #47}
• • “I consider [work in politics] one of the most fruitful exercises of the human mind.”  {Issue #51}
• • “An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”  {blog 12/2009}
• • “Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country
that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.”  {blog 2/2010}
• • “Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.”  {blog 3/2010}
• • “The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat
of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “No sinner forgets his vows of repentance so quickly as one whose fortunes have made a dramatic improvement.”  {blog 12/2012}

entertainer Bette Midler
“We need to show up for the 2022 Midterms as if we were Ukrainians.” - in May 2022  {blog 7/2022}

Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist
“Why hasn't [president-elect Trump] been given more respect? Here's a fair answer: He hasn't earned any.”  {blog 2/2017}

Ylond Miles-Davis
“There are two rules for success . . . 1: Never reveal everything [that] you know.”  {blog 8/2018}

John Stuart Mill [1806-73]
• • “Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign.”
- in 'On Liberty' 1859, "Introductory"  {Issue #25}
• • “Those only are happy who have their mind fixed on some object other than their own happiness.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “We can never be sure that the opinion [that] we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion;
and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”  {blog 3/2012}
• • “I have done my work.” - his last words  {blog 11/2016}
• • “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.”  {blog 1/2023}

Mark Millar
“I often find writer's block a sign that you're actually writing the wrong story.”  {blog 3/2016}

poet Edna St. Vincent Millay [1892-1950]
• • “My heart is warm with the friends I make / And better friends I'll not be knowing /
Yet there isn't a train [that] I wouldn't take / No matter where it's going”  {Issue #67}
• • “Had I abided by good advice I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “Life must go on / I forget just why.”  {blog 4/2016}
• • “Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”  {blog 2/2018}

A.R. Miller
“Is there anything better than coffee? Chocolate, maybe, and sex ranks very close I suppose.”  {blog 2/2016}

playwright Arthur Miller [1915-2005]
• • “Tragedy arises when you are in the presence of a man who has missed
accomplishing his joy.” – in 1950  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.”  {blog 1/2008}
• • “Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”  {blog 5/2008}
• • “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge
of embarrassing him, always.”  {blog 8/2008}
• • “The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater,
or the play – but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away
the veils of illusion as it disappears.”  {blog 11/2013}
• • “All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.”  {blog 3/2016}
• • “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges [that] he cannot walk away from. And by those [that]
he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”  {blog 4/2016}
• • “The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.”  {blog 5/2017}

director Bennett Miller
“Movies are like people; you either trust them or you don't.”  {blog 3/2015}

Dennis Miller
“Politics is a game of 'last man standing'.”  {Issue #48}

writer Henry Miller [1891-1980]
• • “How different war would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.”  {Issue #66}
• • “The real leader has no need to lead, he is content to point the way.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “Do your utmost and let Providence do the rest.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy,
thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine [that] a man can give himself.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched three fold.”
- in "The Books In My Life" [1952]  {blog 12/2023}
• • “The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”  {blog 12/2024}

Henry Miller of San Fernando Valley Mensa
“Religions are merely the explanations of primitives for phenomena beyond their ability to comprehend,
codified and passed on thru generations, and defended as ordained absolutes of behavior.”  {Issue #51}

Jason Lee Miller
“The problem with the human condition is that it involves humans.”  {Issue #70}

Madeline Miller
“Before you write good words you have to get rid of a million bad words.”  {blog 10/2012}

Mark Crispin Miller
“The true cause of the enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans – the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down', the floodtide of corporate
propaganda, the terminal insanity of United States politics – has risen not from any grand decline in the national character . . . but from
the inevitable toxic influence of those few corporations that have monopolized our culture.”  {Issue #23}

education writer Rann Miller
“Anti-racist work - ridding our schools of anti-Blackness, for example - will require that all children are taught historical truths
to understand how racism impacts our society, while being empowered with the tools to eradicate it. Liberation for our society
means liberating all peoples.” - in November 2021  {blog 1/2022}

singer-songwriter Roger Miller [1936-92]
“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”  {blog 5/2013}

Mark Milley
former Army General appointed by Trump as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2019-2023)
“[Donald Trump] is a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country . . . A fascist to the core.”  {blog 12/2024}

C. Wright Mills [1916-1962]
• • “The political calling of the intellectual [lies in] the unmasking of lies which sustain irresponsible power.”  {Issue #9}
• • “In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of humankind, the image [that] we have
of our limits and possibilities. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits
of what it means to be human.”  {Issue #69}
• • “Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning
than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “The central goal of Western humanism is . . . the audacious control by Reason of Man's fate.”  {blog 7/2016}

Heather Mills, on Facebook
“It’s December 27th . . . Do you know what you’re getting your Valentine?”  {blog 1/2018}

Irving Mills [1894-1985]
“It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.”  {blog 7/2010}

A.A. Milne [1882-1956]
• • “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy
when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”  {blog 3/2011}
• • “You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” - in "Winnie The Pooh" [1926]  {blog 9/2013}
• • “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “The things that make me different are the things that make me.”  {blog 8/2015}

John Milton [1608-74]
• • “Let [truth] and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”  {Issue #47}
• • “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”  {blog 12/2024}

rocker Nicki Minaj
• • “You've got to work like it's your first day on the job every day.”  {blog 8/2013}
• • “You gotta be a beast – that's the only way [that] they'll respect you.”  {blog 3/2015}

jazz musician Charles Mingus [1922-79]
“Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”  {Issue #39}

movie director Vincente Minnelli [1903-86]
“[A movie] that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that
the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.”  {blog 3/2011}

CFO & multiple board member George E. Minnich
“The consequences of our not thinking are great . . . People who aren't thinking are capable of anything.”  {blog 6/2017}

Newton Minow [1926-2023]
“When television is bad, nothing is worse. You will observe a vast wasteland.” – May 1961  {Issue #46}

singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell
“If I experience any frustration, its the frustration of being misunderstood. But that's what stardom is
– a glamourous misunderstanding.” - in 1979 interview  {blog 11/2017}

Nancy Mitford [1904-73]
“The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.”  {blog 8/2014}

Japanese manga artist Kentaro Miura [1966-2021]
“Hate is a place where a man who can't stand sadness goes.”  {blog 12/2024}

silent movie cowboy star Tom Mix [1880-1940]
“The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it's a state of mind.
It's whatever you want it to be.”  {blog 8/2008}

playwright Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]
• • “The most pitiful human ailment is a birdseed heart.”  {blog 9/2008}
• • “A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.”  {blog 6/2011}
• • “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.”  {blog 8/2019}

playwright (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) Molière [1622-73]
• • “To honor all men is to honor none.”  (in "The Misanthrope")  {Issue #36}
• • “It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.”  {blog 4/2010}
• • “It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.”  {blog 1/2013}
• • “The greater the obstacle, the more glory [in] overcoming it.”  {blog 8/2013}

Christopher Moltisanti character on "The Sopranos" H.B.O. TV show
“Other people’s definitions of you, sometimes they’re more about making themselves feel better. You gotta define yourself.”  {blog 4/2024}

Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday [1934-2024]
“It has been said, 'The West has to be seen to be believed'. But it has to be believed to be seen.”  {blog 3/2015}

British author George Monbiot
“Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”  {blog 2/2019}

French impressionist painter Claude Monet [1840-1926]
“I would like to paint the way [that] a bird sings.”  {blog 11/2022}

jazz musician Thelonius Monk [1917-82]
“It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.”  {Issue #71}

basketball star Earl Monroe
“Sports is the only profession I know that when you retire, you have to go to work.”  {blog 12/2012}

actress Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]
• • “I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.”  {blog 6/2008}
• • “I've been on a calendar, but never on time.”  {blog 10/2009}
• • “Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you $50,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul.”  {blog 11/2011}
• • “In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “I have too many fantasies to be a housewife . . . I guess I am a fantasy.”  {blog 4/2017}
• • “Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting
world than the one around me.”  {blog 5/2017}
• • “If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything.”  {blog 11/2022}

Thomas S. Monson
“Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything
that would damage his self-respect.”  {blog 4/2009}

anthropologist Ashley Montagu [1905-99]
“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”  {blog 2/2018}

essayist (Michel Eyquem de) Montaigne [1533-92]
• • “The clearest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.”  {Issue #62}
• • “He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”  {blog 11/2009}
• • “The art of dining well is no slight art, nor the pleasure slight.”  {blog 10/2010}
• • “A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “Scratching is one of Nature's sweetest gratifications.”  {blog 10/2012}
• • “Memory presents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.”  {blog 12/2012}
• • “He who fears [that] he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “There is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead.”  {blog 2/2019}
• • “Je divague fort, j'y retourne (I ramble hard, I'm going back).”  {blog 3/2020}

essayist (Charles de Secondat, Baron de) Montesquieu [1689-1755]
• • “Republics end thru luxury, monarchies thru poverty.”  {Issue #43}
• • “The deterioration of a government begins almost always by a decay of its principles.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them.”  {blog 4/2011}
• • “There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”  {blog 4/2018}

Dr. Maria Montessori [1870-1952]
• • “Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.”  {blog 11/2014}

Canadian author L.M. {Lucy Maud} Montgomery [1874-1942]
• • “I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe [that] the best does.” - in "Anne of Green Gables" [1908]  {blog 8/2016}
• • “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.” - in "Anne of Green Gables" [1908]  {blog 11/2016}
• • “I'm always sorry when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them.
With them it's grand and great.”  {blog 7/2017}

D.L. Moody [1837-99]
“Our fear should not be that we are not successful but that we are successful at something that doesn't matter.”  {blog 4/2015}

Alan Moore
“Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical science-fiction cowboy detective novel.”  {blog 3/2016}

poet Marianne Moore [1887-1972]
“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.”  {blog 11/2012}

actress Mary Tyler Moore [1936-2017]
“Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.”  {blog 3/2017}

gadfly filmmaker Michael Moore
• • “Democracy is not a spectator sport, and being a citizen should imply
that [you're] active and caring.”  {Issue #43}
• • “Do something!” {at the end of his 2004 documentary film 'Fahrenheit 9/11'}  {Issue #45}
• • “More people voted for Kerry than for Reagan.”  {Issue #48}
• • “A better day is coming.”  {blog 10/2007}

Stephen Moore, senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign, 2018
“Capitalism is more important than democracy.”  {blog 6/2019}

Thomas Moore [1779-1852]
“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which
their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”  {blog 4/2018}

Sir Thomas More [1478-1535]
• • “If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “What part soever you take upon you, play that as well as you can and make the best of it.”  {blog 7/2024}

French actress Jeanne Moreau [1928-2017]
“The common thing between all the men I've loved? Meee!”  {blog 7/2022}

Chris Morgan
“Life: be the example or be made the example.”  {blog 11/2022}

Edmund S. Morgan
“Patriotism is so often a disguise that the genuine article is always surprising.”  {Issue #51}

broadcast journalist Edward P. Morgan [1910-93]
“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off
in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.”  {blog 6/2011}

banker John Pierpont 'J.P.' Morgan [1837-1913]
• • “A man always/generally has two reasons for what he does – a good one and the real one.”  {blog 3/2013 & 10/2021}
• • “If you have to ask the cost of owning a yacht, you can't afford it.”  {blog 8/2013 & 11/2020}
• • “Gold is money, everything else is credit.” - in testimony before Congress shortly before his death  {blog 3/2018}
• • “Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.”  {blog 2/2021}
• • “Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.”  {blog 9/2016}
• • “Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see farther.”  {blog 7/2024}
• • “When you expect things to happen - strangely enough - they do happen.”  {blog 12/2024}
• • “No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific,
concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.”  {blog 12/2024}

Christopher Morley [1890-1957]
“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets one. It is like falling in love.”  {blog 12/2015}

Jack Balderrama Morley
“Money can’t buy you class, but it can post bail.”  {blog 7/2022}

Robert Morley [1906-92]
“No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.”  {blog 9/2008}

filmmaker Errol Morris
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.”  {blog 3/2013}

author Janet E. Morris
“Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible.”  {blog 8/2018}

William Morris
“Have nothing . . . that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”  {blog 11/2008}

rock music legend Jim Morrison [1943-71]
• • “Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.”  {blog 7/2013}
• • “If my poetry is aimed at achieving anything it is to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”  {blog 1/2014}

Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times columnist
“When the little guy wants help, he asks the government to write a check. When the big guy
wants help, he asks the government to write a law.”  {Issue #43}

Robert S. Morrison, Vice Chairman of Pepsi-Co, 2001-2003
“The biggest enemy is tap water.”  {blog 6/2012}

Nobel-laureate author Toni Morrison [1931-2019]
• • “Remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free someone else. If you have some power,
then your job is to empower someone else.”  {blog 6/2016}
• • “If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”  {blog 6/2017}
• • “Word-work is sublime . . . because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way
in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
- in her Nobel lecture in 1993  {blog 8/2019}
• • “I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”  {blog 5/2020}
• • “I know [that] the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb
to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.”  {blog 7/2021}
• • “I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would've loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more.”
- in "The Song of Solomon" [1977]  {blog 3/2023}
• • “Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.” - in "Sula" [1973 novel]  {blog 4/2024}

Kendall Morse
“Life really does go on whether you're enjoying it or not.”  {blog 6/2012}

Anna Mary Robertson 'Grandma' Moses [1860-1961]
“A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.”  {blog 9/2014}

novelist Ottessa Moshfegh
“Living an interesting life is a precondition to being an interesting person.”  {blog 9/2015}

author-activist Walter Mosley
• • “The only way to be free is to free yourself.”  {Issue #62}
• • “It is not the questing after wealth and prosperity that made [America] great
but the belief in the rights of all human beings.”  {Issue #66}

Dow Mossman
“Sometimes words are the longest things there are.”  {Issue #39}

political theorist Yascha Mounk
“Hillary Clinton carried only 472 counties in America out of more than 3,000, but those 472 were predominately urban and
accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country's economic output.”  {blog 6/2017}

MovieMaker Magazine [est. 1993]
“We tried to find some non-coronavirus news, honest we did.” - email newsletter, 13 March 2020  {blog 3/2020}

TV journalist Bill Moyers
• • “Congress belongs to the highest bidder.” (2006)  {Issue #58}
• • “Democracy works when people claim it as their own.”  {Issue #68}
• • “The promise of America leaves no one out.”  {Issue #69}
• • “This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and
low social mobility at the bottom . . . Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a
plutocracy, where they are disposable. [In an earlier era] the remedy was a popular insurgency that
ignited the spark of democracy . . . Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.”  {blog 6/2010}
• • “Unlimited corporate funding of candidates is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy.”  {blog 11/2010}
• • “Secrecy is the freedom [that] tyrants dream of.”  {blog 3/2011}

U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]
• • “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”   {blog 11/2010}
• • “No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.”   {blog 11/2010}
• • “The single most exciting thing [that] you encounter in government is competence, because it is so rare.”  {blog 4/2012}
• • “Data is the plural of anecdote.”  {blog 6/2012}

Robert Mueller
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2001-2013; Special Counsel investigating RussiaGate, 2017-2019
“If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.”  {blog 12/2017}

pioneer eco-activist John Muir [1838-1914]
• • “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in . . . where nature may heal
and give strength to body and soul alike.”  {Issue #36}
• • “The clearest way into the universe is thru a forest wilderness.”  {blog 10/2007}
• • “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”  {blog 11/2007}
• • “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.”  {blog 9/2012}
• • “The power of imagination makes us infinite.”  {blog 4/2014}
• • “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”  {blog 7/2021}
• • “Of all the paths [that] you take in life, make sure [that] a few of them are dirt”  {blog 7/2021}

Michael Mukasey, figurehead U.S Attorney General [2008]
“Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”  {blog 9/2008}

Swami Muktananda [1908-82]
“[The] precepts of Siddha Yoga [are]: Kneel to your own Self. Worship your Self. Meditate on your Self. Love your Self.
Honor your Self. God dwells within you as you.”   {blog 11/2022}

Martin Mull
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”  {blog 11/2010}

Barry Munitz
“[Albert Einstein] lived his life as though there was no distinction between art and science.”
- then-president of the J. Paul Getty Trust (2004)  {blog 10/2016}

Nobel-laureate Canadian writer Alice Munro
• • “Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”  {blog 12/2012}
• • “The constant happiness is curiosity.”  {blog 3/2018}

cartoonist Randall Munroe
“To the surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be the best system for determining which of two things is larger.”  {blog 12/2012}

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami
• • “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”  {blog 7/2015}
• • “The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”  {blog 11/2016 & 9/2017}
• • “And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact,
whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.
That’s what this storm’s all about.” - in the 2002 novel "Kafka On The Shore"  {blog 2/2017}
• • “If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”  {blog 11/2017}
• • “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”  {blog 2/2018}
• • “Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “A cold beer at the end of the day is the best thing life has to offer.” - in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" [1994-95]  {blog 6/2019}
• • “As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts lasts; what doesn't doesn't. Time solves most things.
And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.”  {blog 3/2023}
• • “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”  {blog 8/2023}

Elizabeth Murdoch {Freud}
“Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”  {blog 5/2013}

Iris Murdoch [1919-99]
• • “Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”  {blog 8/2011}
• • “One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”  {blog 5/2013}
• • “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”  {blog 11/2013}

James Murdoch, executive at Fox & News Corp.
“There are no good Nazis.”  {blog 8/2017}

televangelist Mike Murdock
“The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.”  {blog 8/2014}

Suzanne Murphy of Southampton, NY
“I am disgusted by what a thoroughly dishonest nation of money-hungry fools we Americans have become.”
— Time Magazine Letters, July 2005  {blog 1/2014}

Bill Murray
“So, if we lie to the government it's a felony. But if they lie to us it's politics.”  {blog 8/2016}

Ty Murray
“The great cowboys are the ones with the biggest hearts.”  {blog 8/2008}

Varda Murrell
“Don't quit before the miracle.”  {Issue #32}

journalist Edward R. Murrow [1908-65]
Edward R. Murrow Quotations Page at Working Minds
Edward R. Murrow Page at Magic Lantern Video & Book Store

Miyamoto Musashi [1584?-1645]
“There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within.
Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”  {blog 11/2017}

serial entrepreneur Elon Musk
• • “When something becomes important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”  {blog 10/2015}
• • “Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.”  {blog 2/2018}

Benito Mussolini [1883-1945], Fascist dictator of Italy 1927-45
• • “The truth is that men are tired of liberty.”  {blog 3/2018}
• • “Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.”  {blog 6/2018}
• • “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.”  {blog 8/2019}
• • “It is good to trust others, but not to do so is much better.”  {blog 7/2022}
• • “The masses are already longing for a dictator.” - in 1921  {blog 7/2022}

Bess Myerson
“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.”  {blog 10/2011}

economist Gunnar Myrdal [1898-1987]
“America is conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.”  {blog 10/2017}

author Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]
• • “Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”  {Issue #71}
• • “Why not make the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him.”  {blog 11/2008}
• • “Parody is a game; satire is a lesson.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than
in the ooze of the past.”  {blog 1/2010}
• • “Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.”  {blog 12/2011}
• • “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader, is a rereader.”  {blog 6/2016}
• • “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the
individual reader is important to me.” - in a 1964 Playboy Magazine Interview  {blog 8/2017}
• • “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”  {blog 1/2023}

activist Ralph Nader
“[Brett] Kavanaugh is a corporate supremacist to a fanatic level of protecting corporate cruelty and greed. Giving him an unaccountable
lifetime position on the Court will weaken our democracy and empower the corporate state.” - in September 2018  {blog 9/2018}

V.S. Naipaul [1932-2018]
• • “Intellect and will, intellect and will.”  {Issue #28}
• • “The only lies for which we are truly punished are those [that] we tell ourselves.”  {blog 5/2013}

John Naisbitt
“We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge.”  {blog 6/2019}

novelist R.K. Narayan [1906-2001]
“You become a writer by writing. It is a yoga.”  {blog 2/2009}

rock legend Graham Nash
“Make sure that the things [that] you do keep us alive.”  — song lyric {blog 2/2014}

Ogden Nash [1902-71]
• • “Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”  {blog 12/2007}
• • “The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.”  {blog 7/2012}

George Jean Nathan [1882-1958]
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”  {blog 3/2011}

neon art piece by Bruce Nauman
“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”  {blog 4/2010}

Russian activist Alexei Navalny [1976-2024]
last words: “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”  {blog 12/2024}

athlete Martina Navratilova
“I just try to concentrate on concentrating.”  {blog 6/2012}

U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson [1916-2005] of Wisconsin
founder of Earth Day [est. 1970]
“The wealth of the nation is its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats,
and biodiversity . . . that’s all there is. That’s the whole economy. That’s where all the economic activity and jobs come from.
These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world.”  {blog 4/2015}

New York Daily News reporter Lars-Erik Nelson [1941-2000]
“[The internet] is a vanity press for the demented, the conspiratorial, or the merely self-important.”  {blog 1/2012}

musician Willie Nelson [b. 1933]
• • “Fortunately, we're not in control.”  {Issue #48}
• • “I like myself better when I'm writing regularly.”  {blog 6/2009}
• • “I believe in doing something every day to pay for the day.”  {blog 5/2022}
• • “There are more old drunks than there are old doctors.”  {blog 5/2022}

poet Pablo Neruda [1904-73]
• • “Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”  {blog 2/2009}
• • “Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”  {blog 8/2023}

Herb Neu
“Interesting time to be living in, where 'stop shooting our kids' is seen as a 'liberal talking point' by the 'pro-life' crowd.” - on Facebook  {blog 3/2018}

Charles B. Newcomb
“Let us move on, and step out boldly, though it be into the night, and we can scarcely see the way.”  {Issue #51}

Capt. Francis Newcombe [1878-1956]
“Chance is the playground of fools.”  {blog 3/2015}

John Newhouse
“The [Bush] administration is trying to create reality, not deal with it.”  {Issue #40}

Karol Newlin
“It often shows an excellent command of language to say nothing.”  {Issue #22}

John Henry Newman [1801-90]
“Growth is the only evidence of life.”  {blog 7/2010}

Sir Isaac Newton [1643-1727]
• • “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”  {blog 12/2013}
• • “To myself, I am the only child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”  {blog 7/2018}

Haing S. Ngor [1940-96]
“If you are unhappy before fame, you will probably be unhappy during fame.”  {blog 5/2009}

Thanh T. Nguyen
“Great thinkers are there not for us to respect unquestioningly but rather to question respectfully.”  {blog 11/2016}

Gene Nichol
“Why should we believe [that] the private sector will take care of poverty? It never has in our history.”  {blog 11/2011}

Mike Nichols [1931-2014]
“That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive
for the appearance of it.”  {blog 8/2018}

Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine
• • “Honestly, I just assume that many declines in the quality of American life for the foreseeable future will be
announced with 'In a 6–3 decision . . .'.”  {blog 7/2022}
• • “Look, it’s a puppet show; it doesn’t have to make sense.”  {blog 10/2022}
• • “The reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating
of Paul Pelosi . . . marks a new level of depravity in the G.O.P.”  {blog 11/2022}
• • “[We are] in a country that doesn’t care about reality or government or decency or much of anything else.”  {blog 1/2023}
• • “I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally-flawed choice to
continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.” - in the March 2023 issue  {blog 3/2023}
• • “Naming lunatics and shaming poltroons is essential to a healthy democracy.”  {blog 8/2023}
• • “So often the case with modern Republicans [is that] every accusation is a confession, and every assertion is projection.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “The G.O.P. . . . [is] a party that is clearly more comfortable with performance art centered on imaginary grievances
than with actual governing.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “The first G.O.P. primary debate confirmed the end of the old Republican Party and squelched any hope for a normal presidential election
in 2024 . . . Beyond the scorekeeping, what the G.O.P. debate showed is that the Republicans, as a party, don’t care very much about policy, that
the G.O.P. contenders remain in the grip of moral cowardice, and that Fox News is just as bad, if not worse, than it’s ever been.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “The Republicans [backing] Trump are driven by two factors: ambition and delusion.”  {blog 12/2023}
• • “Trump and his supporters ... are deadly serious about their intentions to take power and destroy democracy.”  {blog 12/2023}

actor Jack Nicholson
“Beer, it's the best damn drink in the world.”  {blog 5/2018}

Brasilian architect Oscar Niemeyer [1907-2012]
“Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, if only for an instant.”  {blog 12/2012}

Pastor Martin Niemöller [1892-1984]
“When they came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”  {Issue #57}

Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations Page at Working Minds
Friedrich Nietzsche Page at Maison d'Être Philosophy Bookstore

Earl Nightingale [1921-89]
“Success is the progressive realization of a worthwile dream or goal.”  {blog 12/2017}

Florence Nightingale [1820-1910]
• • “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well.”  {blog 4/2016}
• • “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.”  {blog 12/2017}

Leonard Nimoy [1931-2015]
“My folks came to the U.S. as immigrants, aliens, and became citizens. I was born in Boston, a citizen,
went to Hollywood, and became an alien.”   {blog 3/2015}

writer Anaïs Nin [1903-77]
• • “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”  {Issues #49 & #56}
• • “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”  {blog 7/2011}
• • “We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.”  {blog 11/2012}
• • “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people's.”  {blog 8/2015}
• • “I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”  {blog 9/2015}
• • “If you do not breathe thru writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write,
because our culture has no use for it.”  {blog 2/2017}
• • “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially.
We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward,
or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”  {blog 3/2018}
• • “I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully,
enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”  {blog 8/2018}
• • “My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts,
my appearance, my flaws - and to stop this incessant worrying that I can't be loved as I am.”  {blog 9/2018}
• • “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors
and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”  {blog 10/2022}
• • “You cannot save people. You can only love them.”  {blog 11/2022}
• • “I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning,
and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”  {blog 1/2023}
• • “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”  {blog 8/2023}

Richard M. Nixon [1913-94]
37th President of the United States, 1969-74
• • “A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits.”  {Issue #64}
• • “I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably, or even usually, dirty business.”  {blog 10/2008}
• • “Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.”  {blog 9/2012}

lawyer Louis Nizer [1902-94]
• • “True religion is the life [that] we lead, not the creed [that] we profess.”  {blog 2/2012}
• • “A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults.”  {blog 3/2012}

Alfred Nobel [1833-96]
• • “If I have a thousand ideas and only one of them turns out to be good, I am satisfied.”  {blog 5/2015}
• • “I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.”  {blog 6/2015}
• • “My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies
can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.”  {blog 8/2015}

Gen. Charles C. Noble [1916-2003]
“You must have long range goals to keep from being frustrated by short range failures.”  {blog 1/2018}

Mary G. Nocella of Wayne, New Jersey
“The torture of prisoners has stained the American character, and the naming of [Alberto] Gonzales
as Attorney General has made that stain indelible.” (in Letters Dept. of Time Magazine, Feb 2005]   {Issue #50}

filmmaker Gaspar Noé
• • “Drink alcohol when needed, but don't get drunk. If you can't prevent yourself from doing drugs, at least share them.”  {blog 11/2015}
• • “Your movies are like babies who need love. You have to carry them and take care of them for at least one year after their birth.
Being a director is like being a dad.”  {blog 12/2015}

Andrew Nolan
“Seek the truth or hide your head in the sand. Both require digging.”  {blog 8/2014}

'Non Sequitur' newspaper cartoon by Wiley Miller
“The secret to a long life is knowing when to pull the rip cord.”  {blog 8/2018}

columnist Peggy Noonan
“Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”, in The Wall Street Journal (in 2004)  {blog 7/2010}

Ray Noorda [1924-2006]
“Cause change and lead; accept change and survive; resist change and die.”  {blog 6/2015}

author, philosopher & revolutionary G.E. Nordell
G.E. Nordell Quotations Page at Working Minds
G.E. Nordell's main website

Richard Nordell [1947-2015]
“Always get it in writing. If they say don't worry, then I do.”  {Issue #53}

Thomas C. 'Tom' Nordell [1946-2006]
{last words} “Can I go fishing now?”

comedian Mark Normand
“I look at politicians the same way [that] I look at C.B.D. gummies. I know [that] a lot of people believe in them, but I'm not sure
[that] they're actually doing anything.”  {blog 4/2024}

Frank Norris [1870-1902]
“The people have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  {blog 1/2012}

poet Kathleen Norris
“Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past, it loses the future.”  {blog 9/2015}

Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe [1865-1922]
“News is what someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know. Everything else is advertising.”  {blog 5/2009}

Charles Eliot Norton [1827-1908]
“The voice of protest . . . is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum . . . is bidding all men . . .
obey in silence the tyrannous word of command.”  {blog 1/2014}

high school basketball coach Tim Notke
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”  {blog 10/2021}

Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen [1932-96]
“The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love,
a gift to be celebrated with joy.”  {blog 11/2022}

historian Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.
“Los Angeles is fast-paced. We kind of live in the future. We tear things down quickly.”  {Issue #52}

Rudolf Nureyev [1938-93]
“You live as long as you dance.”  {blog 2/2019}

Bill Nye, The Science Guy
“Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science – in all of biology.”  {blog 2/2018}

J.M.K. Nyks
“Nothing is so detrimental to quality as success.”  {blog 9/2008}

Niki Nymark of St. Louis
“There have been no dragons in my life / Only small spiders, and stepping in gum . . . / I could have coped with dragons"
- poem circa 1970s  {blog 3/2017}