Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people.

John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

Forget about the reasons and
The treasons we are seeking.
Forget about the notion that
Our emotions can be kept at bay,
Forget about being guilty,
We are innocent instead
For soon we will all find our lives swept away.

Dave Matthews, Seek Up

Concentrate on the real thing while you have the chance.

Bob Shaw, The Ceres Solution (A good SciFi read.)

Lyrics On Demand - for when you need to know all the words.

…the lessons to be learned from Thucydides are no different from the ones that the tragic playwrights teach: that the arrogant self can become the abject Other; that failure to bend, to negotiate, inevitably results in terrible fracture; that, because we are only human, our knowledge is merely knowingness, our vision partial rather than whole, and we must tread carefully in the world.

Daniel Mendelsohn, “Theatres of War,” The New Yorker, January 12, 2004

The Nile First Descent Expedition - Pasquale "PV" Scaturro's site

McQuillan walked into a bar and ordered martini after martini, each time removing the olives and placing them in a jar. When the jar was filled with olives and all the drinks consumed, the Irishman started to leave. "S' cuse me", said a customer, who was puzzled over what McQuillan had done,"what was that all about?" "Nothin', said the Irishman, "me wife just sent me out for a jar of olives!"

A martini joke, not an Irish joke: "He said, like James Bond? I said, yes, just like James Bond."

…all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses…are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.

A young John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

latitudinarian adj. Not restrained; not confined; thinking or acting at large.

latitudinarian n.s. One who departs from orthodoxy.

From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

Consciousness is an interminable yakking, a frantic effort to keep up appearances, to make the game seem always to be your game.

Louis Menand, review of Updike's fiction in the December 1, 2003 New Yorker.

Life is short. The sooner that a man begins to enjoy his wealth, the better.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell

A pessimistic law of history was at work here. Many such mixed communities [as Nagorny Karabakh] coexisted for centuries, not just in the Caucasus but throughout Eurasia and North Africa. And yet they were, in reality, only held together by fear, the fear of what a brutal outside authority would do to them all if mutual tolerance broke down. When the external pressure was removed, whether it was the Caliphate, the Tsardom, the Ottoman or British Empire, or Soviet power, then the current of fear which enforced that mutual tolerance was switched off.

Neal Ascherson, In the Black Garden, New York Review of November 20, 2003.

The John Clare page

Strictly Business by Paul Krugman in the NYRB.

What we think is a gesture of freedom is a symptom of our cage. ...Planets and moons form, and people stick to them because something in the cosmos is trying to keep itself company.

Nicolas Pizzolatto, "Ghost-Birds" in the October 2003 Atlantic Monthly

Everything was okay until he got shot.

Lt. Col. (USArmy, ret.) Larry May

OriginsNet -- the origins of man, religion, art and mind

A credible threat to one's life has a certain bracing effect.

Wife quoting husband.

When and from where [the Sumerians] first settled near the Euphrates was much debated a generation ago, but without any clear consensus. People had settled the region and were growing crops by irrigation before 5000 BC; the best we can say is that the urbanized people who, before 3000 BC, first wrote Sumerian emerged out of this agricultural way of life and tradition without any obvious break.

Timothy Potts, in “Buried Between the Rivers”, New York Review, 9/25/2003

Well I've been out walking,
I don't do that much talking these days,
These days--
These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do.

I sit alone on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten,
My friend
Don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them.

Jackson Browne, from These Days