Friday, November 24, 2006

[L]ibertarians have always tended to see social conservatives as rubes ready to thump nonbelievers on the head with the Bible first chance they get, and social conservatives have always tended to see libertarians as dope-smoking devil-worshippers.

--- Ryan Sager in “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party,” quoted in The neglected swing voters , The Economist, Oct 19th 2006

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

I believe that the so-called "writing block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance ... One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing.

--- Poet William Stafford, quoted by Roy Peter Clark in "Writing Tool #33: Rehearsal"

Monday, November 20, 2006

It's never too late to be who you might have been

--- George Eliot, English novelist (1819 - 1880)

Sunday, November 12, 2006

We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted.

--- Shelly Turkle, sociologist, in New Scientist interview, Living online: I'll have to ask my friends, 16 Sep 2006, issue #2569