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If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

Jack Handey

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Saturday Night Live, created by Lorne Michaels, season 17, episode 3, NBC, 12 Oct. 1991.

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Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

Konrad Lorenz

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Lorenz, Konrad. Quoted in New York Times Magazine. 11 Apr. 1965.

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The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.

Edwin Edwards

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Edwards, Edwin. Spoken while campaigning for governor of Louisiana. 1983, LA, USA.

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If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with "Let's Make a Deal."

Fran Lebowitz

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community

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Lebowitz, Fran. "The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community." The New York Times, 13 Sept. 1987.

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On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

William Least Heat-Moon

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Heat-Moon, William Least. Blue Highways. Fawcett Crest, 1982, preface.

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As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Mike Godwin

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Godwin, Mike. "Meme, Counter-Meme." Wired, 1 Oct. 1994.

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If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.

William J. Brennan, Jr.

Eisentadt v. Baird

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Brennan, William J, Jr. United States, Supreme Court. Eisentadt v. Baird. United States Reports, vol. 405, 22 Mar. 1972, pp. 438-472. supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/405/438/.

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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

John Updike

Self-Consciousness

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Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, ch. 4.

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If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

Jacques Barzun

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The House of Intellect

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Barzun, Jacques. The House of Intellect. Harper & Brothers, 1959, ch. 6.

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All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Age of Uncertainty. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1977, ch. 12.

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And were an epitaph to be my story
I'd have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I have a lovers quarrel with the world.

Robert Frost

The Lesson for Today

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Frost, Robert. Reading of The Lesson for Today at Harvard University. 20 June 1941, Phi Beta Kappa Society meeting, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

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If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Calvin Coolidge

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Coolidge, Calvin. Speech on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 5 July 1926, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

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Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have no winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

William Ernest Henley

Invictus

Read Invictus at Poetry Foundation

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Henley, William Ernest. Book of Verses. London: David Nutt, 1888.

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Henley, William Ernest. "Invictus." A Selection of Poems. White Press, 2015, st. 1.

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But, as the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

William E. Gladstone

Kin Beyond Sea

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Gladstone, William E. "Kin Beyond Sea." North American Review, Sept. 1878 - Oct. 1878.

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Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is stuck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

William Hazlitt

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Hazlitt, William. "On Wit and Humour." Lectures on the English Comic Writers. c. 1818, Surrey Institution, London, England, UK.

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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern-why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

William Hazlitt

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Original Citation

Hazlitt, William. "On the Fear of Death." Table-Talk; Or, Original Essays. Vol. 2, London: H. Colburn.

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Hazlitt, William. "On the Fear of Death." The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, edited by Duncan Wu. Vol. 6, Routledge, 2020.

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A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

Samuel Eliot Morison

On Americans, specifically "Yankees".

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Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783-1860. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921, ch. 2.

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The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

John R. Searle

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Searle, John R. "Minds, Brains, and Science." Reith Lectures. BBC Radio 4. 1984. Radio.

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Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Countee Cullen

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Incident

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Original Citation

Cullen, Countee. "Incident." Color. Harper & Brothers, 1925, I. 5.

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Cullen, Countee. "Incident." Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, edited by Major Jackson. Library of America, 2013, I. 5.

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Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.