ephlis01 SUMMER/FALL 2001 (THE LOST ISSUE): Part 4
Page 5-7: Quips and Quotes (Times New Roman font). Original section contained the quotes up to and including Curtis Cuffie. Subsequent quotes were added sporadically over time after September of 2001:
I want him [Alan Greenspan] once to go up to Capitol Hill and testify by saying ... I must report to you that our economy is not sound because it has 20 percent child poverty and 47 million workers without a livable wage.
Ralph Nader
The American People have spoken. All five of them.
Mort Sahl, on the conclusion of the 2000 presidential election.
This life is the crossing of a sea, where we meet in the same narrow ship. In death we reach the shore and go to our different worlds.
Rabindranath Tagore
He’s all slaw and no ribs
Maureen Dowd, on President Bush.
He who brings home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.
Spanish Proverb
You can come down here and fight for free, without any publicity, with an old character like me who is fifty years old and weighs 209 and thinks you are a shit, Senator, and would knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived.
Ernest Hemingway, to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Although they’re inventing all this amazing stuff, they’re not so eager to live with it. They’re just preparing it for the next generations.
Frank Gehry, architect, explaining why researchers at MIT developing controls for heating, cooling, telephones, lighting and communications chose old fashioned thermostats and light switches for the new computer science lab.
Townes Van Zandt is the best damn songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say it.
Steve Earle
The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I'm in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong. So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You're just as poor as Negroes." And I said, "You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march."
Martin Luther King, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, February 4, 1968.
To a man with an empty stomach, food is God.
Gandhi
It got my life together; got it out of being lost. The things I find, they talk to me. I take them home. Spread them out. If the wind coming in through the screen blow them together, if I see two be touching when I wake in the morning, then I have to work. You have to have an open mind.
Curtis Cuffie, on art. Formerly homeless, Cuffie built sculptures and installations from discarded goods found while roaming the streets of Manhattan. Critics and gallery owners, some of whom discovered Cuffie's work while walking to work, began to pay attention to him by the early 1990's and by 1996 he was off the streets and his career flourished. His work gained wider exposure and received several grants. Last spring Cuffie became an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He was found dead, apparently of a heart attack, on Sept. 13 , 2003 in his apartment. He was 47.
I think it is a contradiction. It can always be called up to drown and overwhelm every movement. The idea in Islam, the most important thing is paradise. No one can be a moderate in wishing to go to paradise. The idea of a moderate state is something cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans here and there.
V.S. Naipaul, Nobel laureate, on nonfundamentalist Islam.
He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often incurious and as a result ill informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be.
David Frum, former White House speechwriter, on George W. Bush.
I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter -- there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one, because . . . to be honest, I hadn't met anyone as promising as Laura since I'd started the DJ-ing, and meeting promising women was what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention . . . and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and . . . oh, there are loads of rules.
Nick Hornby, from High Fidelity.
In 1932 (others accounts say 1934, 1939, and 1940, but Ralph Herrick swears it was 1932), the Herrick brothers had returned from hunting. “We just throwed the dead jack rabbit in the shop when come in and it slid on the floor right up against a pair of deer horns we had in there,” Ralph said, “It looked like that rabbit had horns on it.” His brothers eyes brightened with inspiration. “Let’s mount that thing!”
From the New York Times Obituary of Douglas Herrick, father of the Jackalope, who passed away on January 6, 2003 at the age of 82.
In spite of oppressors, In spite of false leaders, in spite of labor’s own lack of understanding its own needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and think. Slowly his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful of the world. Slowly the cause of his children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker, his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create the wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands.
Mary Harris (Mother) Jones, from The Autobiography of Mother Jones, published in 1925.
A dangerous leader is one who knows nothing of sacrifice.
Scott Link
When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.
Andy Warhol
The [former editor] told me that back then he had just been fired for being an alcoholic, and as a parting shot he put my picture in the magazine because it was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen.
Phillip Pearlstein, American realist painter, on the reason a reproduction of a highly expressionistic landscape of his ended up in Arts Magazine in the 1950’s, which gave his career a big boost.
When smashing monuments, save the pedestals—they always come in handy.
Stanislaw Lec
The president seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts and is making a systematic effort to manipulate the facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.
Al Gore
