Dividing Wealth

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

~~~~~ Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931 - 2005

On the literary merit of a book…

One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case-history of the author’s sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of different ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some , like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

Reading – An Essay by W.H. Auden

Section Quotes from Christopher Moore's "Practical Demonkeeping"

Like one that on that lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And no more turns his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

All mystical experience is coincidence;
and vice versa, of course.

Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth.
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.

John Milton

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, p. 146

“What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building- these things stand in judgment on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.”

On Creativity

One man’s creative leap can be the same for another, so long as the next man was unaware of the last man’s actions. As Nozick put it:

“It is trite to say that everything is like everything else in some respects, perhaps highly artificial ones, and different in others. Whether we call something new and different will depend in part on what pigeonholes of classification we actually have. Does it fall into the same category as previously known things or require a new category of its own?”

On Terrorists

“We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—be abandoning every value except the will to power—they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and Totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

-George W. Bush

9.20.2001 Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People