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Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from Harry G. Frankfurt's book, On Bullshit.

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. Nor more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially sutiable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

Quote of the Day

And I distrust anyone who doesn't believe in passion. Which is all Jedi.

Michele Catalano.

Thought of the Day

Man - a being in search of meaning.

--Plato

Thought of the Day

Only as creators!  This has given me the greatest difficulty and goes on being my greatest difficulty:  to recognize that unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are.  The fame, name, and appearance of a thing, what it counts as, its customary measure and weight -- which in the beginning is an arbitrary error for the most part, thrown over things like a gamrent and alient to their essence, even to their skin -- due to the continuous growth of belief in it from generation to generation, this gradudually grows, as it were, onto and into the thing, and turns into its very body.  The initial appearance almost always becomes the essence in the end and acts as essence!  But only a fool would think it was enough to point to this beginning and to this misty mantle of illusion in order to destroy the world that counts as essential, so-called "reality!"  Only as creators can we destroy!  But we also should not forget this:  creating new names and assessments and apparent truths is eventually enough to create new "things."

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 58

Quote of the Day

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything."

- Alexander Hamilton

Have A Nice Day!

A happy face smiles back from the scope of a U.S. Army sniper's rifle, during a mission searching for insurgents in Mosul, Iraq, Monday, Nov. 22, 2004. U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul have been working put down an uprising launched by guerrillas who seized police stations and other sites. (AP Photo/Jim MacMillan)

(From Yahoo! News)

Quotes of the Day

"I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election."

Walt Whitman

What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.

Edmund Burke

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

To give the victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.

Abraham Lincoln

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine

Erroneousness

Bad habits in drawing conclusions. -- The commonest erroneous conclusions drawn by mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it had a right to. Here the conclusion is from the capacity to the fitness to live, from the fitness to live to the right to live. Then: an opinion makes happy, therefore it is a true opinion, its effect is good, therefore it is itself good and true. Here the effect is accorded the predicate beneficent, good, in the sense of useful, and the cause is furnished with the same predicate good, but here in the sense of logically valid. The reverse of this proposition is: a thing cannot prevail, preserve itself, therefore it is wrong; an opinion causes pain and agitation, therefore it is false. The free spirit, who is all too often acquainted with the erroneousness of this kind of reasoning and has to suffer from its consequences, often succumbs to the temptation to draw the opposite conclusions, which are of course in general equally erroneous: a thing cannot prevail, therefore it is good; an opinion causes pain and distress, therefore it is true.

Nietzsche

I mention this aphorism to help setup the savage, brutal, and much-deserved thrashing Christopher Hitchens gives to the porcine propagandist Michael Moore in Slate. Brilliant!

Reaganism of the Day

I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.

Reaganism of the Day

The dustbin of history is littered with remains of those countries that relied on diplomacy to secure their freedom. We must never forget...in the final analysis...that it is our military, industrial and economic strength that offers the best guarantee of peace for America in times of danger.

Courtesy Heritage Foundation