puck61's Blog

By Michael Rivero

I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.

The United States fought the American Revolution primarily over King George III's Currency act, which forced the colonists to conduct their business only using printed bank notes borrowed from the Bank of England at interest. After the revolution, the new United States adopted a radically different economic system in which the government issued its own value-based money, so that private banks like the Bank of England were not siphoning off the wealth of the people through interest-bearing bank notes.

But bankers are nothing if not dedicated to their schemes to acquire your wealth, and know full well how easy it is to corrupt a nation's leaders. Just one year after Mayer Amschel Rothschild had uttered his infamous "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws", the bankers succeeded in setting up a new Private Central Bank called the First Bank of the United States, largely through the efforts of the Rothschild's chief US supporter, Alexander Hamilton. Founded in 1791, by the end of its twenty year charter the First Bank of the United States had almost ruined the nation's economy, while enriching the bankers. Congress refused to renew the charter and signaled their intention to go back to a state issued value based currency on which the people paid no interest at all to any banker. This resulted in a threat from Nathan Mayer Rothschild against the US Government, "Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war." Congress still refused to renew the charter for the First Bank of the United States, whereupon Nathan Mayer Rothschild railed, "Teach those impudent Americans a lesson! Bring them back to colonial status!" The British Prime Minister at the time, Spencer Perceval was adamently opposed to war with the United States, primarily because the majority of England's military might was occupied with the ongoing Napoleonic wars. Spencer Perceval was concerned that Britain might not prevail in a new American war, a concern shared by many in the British government. Then, Spencer Perceval was assassinated (the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated in office) and replaced by Robert Banks Jenkinson, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was fully supportive of a war to recapture the colonies. Financed at virtually no interest by the Rothschild controlled Bank of England, Britain then provoked the war of 1812 to recolonize the United States and force them back into the slavery of the Bank of England, or to plunge the United States into so much debt they would be forced to accept a new private central bank. And the plan worked. Even though the War of 1812 was won by the United States, Congress was forced to grant a new charter for yet another private bank issuing the public currency as loans at interest, the Second Bank of the United States. Once again, private bankers were in control of the nation's money supply and cared not who made the laws or how many British and American soldiers had to die for it.

Once again the nation was plunged into debt, unemployment, and poverty by the predations of the private central bank, and in 1832 Andrew Jackson successfully campaigned for his second term as President under the slogan, "Jackson And No Bank!" True to his word, Jackson succeeds in blocking the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States.

Shortly after President Jackson (the only American President to actually pay off the National Debt) ended the Second Bank of the United States, there was an attempted assassination which failed when both pistols used by the assassin, Richard Lawrence, failed to fire. Lawrence later said that with Jackson dead, "Money would be more plenty."

Of course, the public school system is as subservient to the bankers' wishes to keep certain history from you, just as the corporate media is subservient to Monsanto's wishes to keep the dangers of GMOs from you, and the global warming cult's wishes to conceal from you that the Earth has actually been cooling for the last 16 years. Thus is should come as little surprise that much of the real reasons for the events of the Civil War are not well known to the average American.

When the Confederacy seceded from the United States, the bankers once again saw the opportunity for a rich harvest of debt, and offered to fund Lincoln's efforts to bring the south back into the union, but at 30% interest. Lincoln remarked that he would not free the black man by enslaving the white man to the bankers and using his authority as President, issued a new government currency, the greenback. This was a direct threat to the wealth and power of the central bankers, who quickly responded.

In 1872 New York bankers sent a letter to every bank in the United States, urging them to fund newspapers that opposed government-issued money (Lincoln's greenbacks).

Goaded by the private bankers, much of Europe supported the Confederacy against the Union, with the expectation that victory over Lincoln would mean the end of the Greenback. France and Britain considered an outright attack on the United States to aid the confederacy, but were held at bay by Russia, which had just ended the serfdom system and had a state central bank similar to the system the United States had been founded on. Left free of European intervention, the Union won the war, and Lincoln announced his intention to go on issuing greenbacks. Following Lincoln's assassination, the Greenbacks were pulled from circulation and the American people forced to go back to an economy based on bank notes borrowed at interest from the private bankers. Tsar Alexander II, who authorized Russian militarey assistance to Lincoln, was himself assassinated one year later.

Finally, in 1913, the Private Central Bankers of Europe, in particular the Rothschilds of Great Britain and the Warburgs of Germany, met with their American financial collaborators on Jekyll Island, Georgia to form a new banking cartel with the express purpose of forming the Third Bank of the United States, with the aim of placing complete control of the United States money supply once again under the control of private bankers. Owing to hostility over the previous banks, the name was changed to "The Federal Reserve" system in order to grant the new bank a quasi-governmental image, but in fact it is a privately owned bank, no more "Federal" than Federal Express. Indeed, in 2012, the Federal Reserve successfully rebuffed a Freedom of Information Lawsuit by Bloomberg News on the grounds that as a private banking corporation and not actually a part of the government, the Freedom of Information Act did not apply to the operations of the Federal Reserve. 1913 proved to be a transformative year for the nation's economy, first with the passage of the 16th "income tax" Amendment and the false claim that it had been ratified.

Later that same year, and apparently unwilling to risk another questionable amendment, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act over Christmas holiday 1913, while members of Congress opposed to the measure were at home. This was a very underhanded deal, as the Constitution explicitly vests Congress with the authority to issue the public currency, does not authorize its delegation, and thus should have required a new Amendment to transfer that authority to a private bank. But pass it Congress did, and President Woodrow Wilson signed it as he promised the bankers he would in exchange for generous campaign contributions. Wilson later regretted that decision.

The next year, World War One started, and it is important to remember that prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve, there was no such thing as a world war.

World War One started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but quickly shifted to focus on Germany, whose industrial capacity was seen as an economic threat to Great Britain, who saw the decline of the British Pound as a result of too much emphasis on financial activity to the neglect of agriculture, industrial development, and infrastructure (not unlike the present day United States). Although pre-war Germany had a private central bank, it was heavily restricted and inflation kept to reasonable levels. Under government control, investment was guaranteed to internal economic development, and Germany was seen as a major power. So, in the media of the day, Germany was portrayed as the prime opponent of World War One, and not just defeated, but its industrial base flattened. Following the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was ordered to pay the war costs of all the participating nations, even though Germany had not actually started the war. This amounted to three times the value of all of Germany itself. Germany's private central bank, to whom Germany had gone deeply into debt to pay the costs of the war, broke free of government control, and massive inflation followed (mostly triggered by currency speculators) , permanently trapping the German people in endless debt.

When the Weimar Republic collapsed economically, it opened the door for the National Socialists to take power. Their first financial move was to issue their own state currency which was not borrowed from private central bankers. Freed from having to pay interest on the money in circulation, Germany blossomed and quickly began to rebuild its industry. The media called it "The German Miracle". TIME magazine lionized Hitler for the amazing improvement in life for the German people and the explosion of German industry, and even named him TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938.

Once again, Germany's industrial output became a threat to Great Britain.

"Should Germany merchandise (do business) again in the next 50 years we have led this war (WW1) in vain." - Winston Churchill in The Times (1919) 

"We will force this war upon Hitler, if he wants it or not." - Winston Churchill (1936 broadcast) 

"Germany becomes too powerful. We have to crush it." - Winston Churchill(November 1936 speaking to US - General Robert E. Wood) 

"This war is an English war and its goal is the destruction of Germany." - Winston Churchill (- Autumn 1939 broadcast)

sed currency was also a direct threat to the wealth and power of the private central banks, and as early as 1933 they started to organize a global boycott against Germany to strangle this upstart ruler who thought he could break free of private central bankers!

 

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As had been the case in World War One, Great Britain and other nations threatened by Germany's economic power looked for an excuse to go to war, and as public anger in Germany grew over the boycott, Hitler foolishly gave them that excuse. Years later, in a spirit of candor, the real reasons for that war were made clear.

"The war wasn't only about abolishing fascism, but to conquer sales markets. We could have, if we had intended so, prevented this war from breaking out without doing one shot, but we didn't want to."- Winston Churchill to Truman (Fultun, USA March 1946) 

 

"Germany's unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an independent exchange system from which the world-finance couldn't profit anymore. ...We butchered the wrong pig." -Winston Churchill (The Second World War - Bern, 1960)

As a side note, we need to step back before WW2 and recall Marine Major General Smedley Butler. In 1933, Wall Street bankers and financiers had bankrolled the successful coups by both Hitler and Mussolini. Brown Brothers Harriman in New York was financing Hitler right up to the day war was declared with Germany. And they decided that a fascist dictatorship in the United States based on the one on Italy would be far better for their business interests than Roosevelt's "New Deal" which threatened massive wealth re-distribution to recapitalize the working and middle class of America. So the Wall Street tycoons recruited General Butler to lead the overthrow of the US Government and install a "Secretary of General Affairs" who would be answerable to Wall Street and not the people, would crush social unrest and shut down all labor unions. General Butler pretended to go along with the scheme but then exposed the plot to Congress. Congress, then as now in the pocket of the Wall Street bankers, refused to act. When Roosevelt learned of the planned coup he demanded the arrest of the plotters, but the plotters simply reminded Roosevelt that if any one of them were sent to prison, their friends on Wall Street would deliberatly collapse the still-fragile economy and blame Roosevelt for it. Roosevelt was thus unable to act until the start of WW2, at which time he prosecuted many of the plotters under the Trading With The Enemy act. The Congressional minutes into the coup were finally released in 1967 and became the inspiration for the movie, "Seven Days in May" but with the true financial villains erased from the script.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent more of my time being a high--class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. "I suspected I was just a part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that the Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents." -- General Smedley Butler, former US Marine Corps Commandant,1935

 

As President, John F. Kennedy understood the predatory nature of private central banking. He understood why Andrew Jackson fought so hard to end the Second Bank of the United States. So Kennedy wrote and signed Executive Order 11110 which ordered the US Treasury to issue a new public currency, the United States Note.

 

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Kennedy's United States Notes were not borrowed form the Federal Reserve but created by the US Government and backed by the silver stockpiles held by the US Government. It represented a return to the system of economics the United States had been founded on, and was perfectly legal for Kennedy to do. All told, some four and one half billion dollars went into public circulation, eroding interest payments to the Federal Reserve and loosening their control over the nation. Five months later John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas, and the United States Notes pulled from circulation and destroyed (except for samples held by collectors). John J. McCloy, President of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and President of the World Bank, was named to the Warren Commission, presumably to make certain the banking dimensions behind the assassination were concealed from the public.

As we enter the eleventh year of what future history will most certainly describe as World War Three, we need to examine the financial dimensions behind the wars.

Towards the end of World War Two, when it became obvious that the allies were going to win and dictate the post war environment, the major world economic powers met at Bretton Woods, a luxury resort in New Hampshire in July of 1944, and hammered out the Bretton Woods agreement for international finance. The British Pound lost its position as the global trade and reserve currency to the US dollar (part of the price demanded by Roosevelt in exchange for the US entry into the war). Absent the economic advantages of being the world's "go-to" currency, Britain was forced to nationalize the Bank of England in 1946. The Bretton Woods agreement, ratified in 1945, in addition to making the dollar the global reserve and trade currency, obligated the signatory nations to tie their currencies to the dollar. The nations that ratified Bretton Woods did so on two conditions. The first was that the Federal Reserve would refrain from over-printing the dollar as a means to loot real products and produce from other nations in exchange for ink and paper; basically an imperial tax. That assurance was backed up by the second requirement, which was that the US dollar would always be convertible to gold at $35 per ounce.

Of course, the Federal Reserve, being a private bank and not answerable to the US Government, did start overprinting paper dollars, and much of the perceived prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was the result of foreign nations' obligations to accept the paper notes as being worth gold at the rate of $35 an ounce. Then in 1970, France looked at the huge pile of paper notes sitting in their vaults, for which real French products like wine and cheese had been traded, and notified the United States government that they would exercise their option under Bretton Woods to return the paper notes for gold at the $35 per ounce exchange rate. Of course, the United States had nowhere near the gold to redeem the paper notes, so on August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon "temporarily" suspended the gold convertibility of the US Federal Reserve Notes. This "Nixon shock" effectively ended Bretton Woods and many global currencies started to delink from the US dollar. Worse, since the United States had collateralized their loans with the nation's gold reserves, it quickly became apparent that the US Government did not in fact have enough gold to cover the outstanding debts. Foreign nations began to get very nervous about their loans to the US and understandably were reluctant to loan any additional money to the United States without some form of collateral. So Richard Nixon started the environmental movement, with the EPA and its various programs such as "wilderness zones", Roadless areas", Heritage rivers", "Wetlands", all of which took vast areas of public lands and made them off limits to the American people who were technically the owners of those lands. But Nixon had little concern for the environment and the real purpose of this land grab under the guise of the environment was to pledge those pristine lands and their vast mineral resources as collateral on the national debt. The plethora of different programs was simply to conceal the true scale of how much American land was being pledged to foreign lenders as collateral on the government's debts; eventually almost 25% of the nation itself.

 

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With open lands for collateral already in short supply, the US Government embarked on a new program to shore up sagging international demand for the dollar. The United States approached the world's oil producing nations, mostly in the Middle East, and offered them a deal. In exchange for only selling their oil for dollars, the United States would guarantee the military safety of those oil-rich nations. The oil rich nations would agree to spend and invest their US paper dollars inside the United States, in particular in US Treasury Bonds, redeemable through future generations of US taxpayers. The concept was labeled the "petrodollar". In effect, the US, no longer able to back the dollar with gold, was now backing it with oil. Other peoples' oil. And that necessity to keep control over those oil nations to prop up the dollar has shaped America's foreign policy in the region ever since.

But as America's manufacturing and agriculture has declined, the oil producing nations faced a dilemma. Those piles of US Federal Reserve notes were not able to purchase much from the United States because the United States had little (other than real estate) anyone wanted to buy. Europe's cars and aircraft were superior and less costly, while experiments with GMO food crops led to nations refusing to buy US food exports. Israel's constant belligerence against its neighbors caused them to wonder if the US could actually keep their end of the petrodollar arrangement. Oil producing nations started to talk of selling their oil for whatever currency the purchasers chose to use. Iraq, already hostile to the United States following Desert Storm, demanded the right to sell their oil for Euros in 2000 and in 2002, the United Nations agreed to allow it under the "Oil for food" program instituted following Desert Storm. One year later the United States re-invaded Iraq, lynched Saddam Hussein, and placed Iraq's oil back on the world market only for US dollars.

The clear US policy shift following 9-11, away from being an impartial broker of peace in the Mideast to one of unquestioned support for Israel's aggressions only further eroded confidence in the Petrodollar deal and even more oil producing nations started openly talking of oil trade for other global currencies.

Over in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi had instituted a state-owned central bank and a value based trade currency, the Gold Dinar. Gaddafi announced that Libya's oil was for sale, but only for the Gold Dinar. Other African nations, seeing the rise of the Gold Dinar and the Euro, even as the US dollar continued its inflation-driven decline, flocked to the new Libyan currency for trade. This move had the potential to seriously undermine the global hegemony of the dollar. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a “threat” to the financial security of the world. So, the United States invaded Libya, brutally murdered Qaddafi ( the object lesson of Saddam's lynching not being enough of a message, apparently), imposed a private central bank, and returned Libya's oil output to dollars only. The gold that was to have been made into the Gold Dinars is, as of last report, unaccounted for.

According to General Wesley Clark, the master plan for the "dollarification" of the world's oil nations included seven targets, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran (Venezuela, which dared to sell their oil to China for the Yuan, is a late addition). What is notable about the original seven nations originally targeted by the US is that none of them are members of the Bank for International Settlements, the private central bankers private central bank, located in Switzerland. This meant that these nations were deciding for themselves how to run their nations' economies, rather than submit to the international private banks.

Now the bankers' gun sights are on Iran, which dares to have a government central bank and sell their oil for whatever currency they choose. The war agenda is, as always, to force Iran's oil to be sold only for dollars and to force them to accept a privately owned central bank. Malaysia, one of the new nations without a Rothschild central bank, is now being invaded by a force claimed to be "Al Qaeda", and with the death of President Hugo Chavez, plans to impose a US and banker friendly regime on Venezuela are clearly being implemented.

The German government recently asked for the return of some of their gold bullion from the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve. France has said it will take 5 years to return Germany's gold. The United States has said they will need 8 years to return Germany's gold. This suggests strongly that the Bank of France and the NY Federal Reserve have used the deposited gold for other purposes, most likely to cover gold futures contracts used to artificially suppress the price of gold to keep investors in the equities markets, and the Central Banks are scrambling to find new gold to cover the shortfall and prevent a gold run. So it is inevitable that suddenly France invades Mali, ostensibly to combat Al Qaeda, with the US joining in. Mali just happens to be one of the world's largest gold producers with gold accounting for 80% of Mali exports. War for the bankers does not get more obvious than that!

Mexico has demanded a physical audit of their gold bullion stored at the Bank of England, and along with Venezuela's vast oil reserves (larger than Saudi Arabia), Venezuela's gold mines are a prize lusted after by all the Central Banks that played fast and loose with other peoples' gold bullion. So we can expect regime change if not outright invasion soon.

You have been raised by a public school system and media that constantly assures you that the reasons for all these wars and assassinations are many and varied. The US claims to bring democracy to the conquered lands (they haven't; the usual result of a US overthrow is the imposition of a dictatorship, such as the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and the imposition of the Shah, or the 1973 CIA overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, and the imposition of Augusto Pinochet), or to save a people from a cruel oppressor, revenge for 9-11, or that tired worn-out catch all excuse for invasion, weapons of mass destruction. Assassinations are always passed off as "crazed lone nuts" to obscure the real agenda.

The real agenda is simple. It is enslavement of the people by creation of a false sense of obligation. That obligation is false because the Private Central Banking system, by design, always creates more debt than money with which to pay that debt. Private Central Banking is not science, it is a religion; a set of arbitrary rules created to benefit the priesthood, meaning the owners of the Private Central Bank. The fraud persists, with often lethal results, because the people are tricked into believing that this is the way life is suppoed to be and no alternative exists or should be dreamt of. The same was true of two earlier systems of enslavement, Rule by Divine Right and Slavery, both systems built to trick people into obedience, and both now recognized by modern civilizatyion as illegitimate. Now we are entering a time in human history where we will recognize that rule by debt, or rule by Private Central Bankers issuing the public currency as a loan at interest, is equally illegitimate. It only works as long as people allow themselves to believe that this is the way life is supposed to be.

 

But understand this above all; Private Central Banks do not exist to serve the people, the community, or the nation. Private Central Banks exist to serve their owners, to make them rich beyond the dreams of Midas and all for the cost of ink, paper, and the right bribe to the right official.

Behind all these wars, all these assassinations, the hundred million horrible deaths from all the wars lies a single policy of dictatorship. The private central bankers allow rulers to rule only on the condition that the people of a nation be enslaved to the private central banks. Failing that, said ruler will be killed, and their nation invaded by those other nations enslaved to private central banks.

The so-called "clash of civilizations" we read about on the corporate media is really a war between banking systems, with the private central bankers forcing themselves onto the rest of the world, no matter how many millions must die for it. Indeed the constant hatemongering against Muslims lies in a simple fact. Like the ancient Christians (prior to the Knights Templars private banking system) , Muslims forbid usury, or the lending of money at interest. And that is the reason our government and media insist they must be killed or converted. They refuse to submit to currencies issued at interest. They refuse to be debt slaves.

So off to war your children must go, to spill their blood for the money-junkies' gold. We barely survived the last two world wars. In the nuclear/bioweapon age, are the private central bankers willing to risk incinerating the whole planet just to feed their greed?

Apparently so.

 

Flag waving and propaganda aside, all modern wars are wars by and for the private bankers, fought and bled for by third parties unaware of the true reason they are expected to gracefully be killed and croppled for. The process is quite simple. As soon as the Private Central Bank issues its currency as a loan at interest, the public is forced deeper and deeper into debt. When the people are reluctant to borrow any more, that is when the Keynesian economists demand the government borrow more to keep the pyramid scheme working. When both the people and government refuse to borrow any more, that is when wars are started, to plunge everyone even deeper into debt to pay for the war, then after the war to borrow more to rebuild. When the war is over, the people have about the same as they did before the war, except the graveyards are far larger and everyone is in debt to the private bankers for the next century. This is why Brown Brothers Harriman in New York was funding the rise of Adolf Hitler.

As long as Private Central Banks are allowed to exist, inevitably as the night follows day there will be poverty, hopelessness, and millions of deaths in endless World Wars, until the Earth itself is sacrificed in flames to Mammon.

The path to true peace on Earth lies in the abolishment of all private central banking everywhere, and a return to the state-issued value-based currencies that allow nations and people to become prosperous.

 

 

 

Other articles by Michael Rivero on the fraud of Private Central Banking.

 

THE ELEVENTH MARBLE

 

HOW YOU BECAME A SLAVE TO THE BANKERS!

 

Awaken slaves! - How The Private Central Bank Ponzi Scheme Trapped And Destroyed America

 

THE FATAL FLAWS IN WALL STREET'S ECONOMIC THEORY

 

BANKERS GONE WILD - HOW THE US GOVERNMENT HELPED WALL STREET GANG-RAPE AMERICA'S MIDDLE CLASS (AND MOST OF EUROPE)




 

 

Ask and you shall receive.

The Two Cows Example of Political Philosophy begins with two cows.*

 (©2007 Mike McLoughlin, Executive Director, Memphis Recovery Centers)

 (©2007 Mike McLoughlin, Executive Director, Memphis Recovery Centers)

(©2002 Saskia Oltheten Matheson)

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

Atheism and materialism -- the notion that human life is the accidental and meaningless result of mindless material processes.

Racism and chauvinism -- that certain races or classes of people are inherently superior in ultimate value.

Collectivism -- the thesis that individuals are important only as parts of society, that their lives have no significance or meaning beyond that assumed to them by their society.

Secular humanism -- that we human beings must define the meaning and purpose of our own existence.

Deep ecology -- the belief that the labor and technical achievements of mankind are inherently evil, and that only the undisturbed wilderness is good.

Animal rights anti-humanism -- that non-human animals, despite their lack of will or conscience, are on equal moral standing with human beings by virtue of their capacity for pain and pleasure.

Relativism -- that what is good or right varies fundamentally from time to time or place to place, that there are no universal truths of morality and politics.

Constructivism -- that what is right and just is nothing more than the product of social forces and historical accidents.

Subjectivism -- that what is good or right for an individual is determined simply by that individual's feelings or inclinations.

Cultural determinism -- that human nature is infinitely malleable by culture.

Nominalism -- that nothing has any definite nature, other than that which we ascribe to it through our invention of words or concepts.

Post-modernism -- that science is merely the expression of political ideology, and that the difference between good and bad science, or between science and pseudo-science, has no objective validity.

Scientism -- that there is no knowledge outside science, and that nothing is real that is not scientifically verifiable.

Empiricism -- that nothing exists beyond what can be verified by our five senses.

Skepticism -- that we know nothing with certainty.

Utopianism -- belief in the infinite perfectibility of man.

Positivism -- the denial of the fundamental reality of evil, attributing all human evil to superficial causes, such as poverty, maladjustment, lack of education, or distorted socioeconomic conditions.

Pessimism or cynicism -- the view that mankind is so corrupted that there is no hope for relative progress or improvement.

Ethical dualism -- attributing evil exclusively to some particular group or class (i.e. the Descendents of White Europeans, the Fundamentalist Christians, the bourgeoisie, Jews, the corporate elite, etc. etc.).

Nihilism

• a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake
• nihilistic delusion: the delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist; a sense that everything is unreal
• complete denial of all established authority and institutions 
•  
•  
•  

  Anarchy (from Greek: ἀναρχία anarchía, "without ruler") may refer to any of the following:

  • "No rulership or enforced authority." [1]
  • "Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder."[2]
  • "A social state in which there is no governing person or group of people, but each individual has absolute liberty (without the implication of disorder)."[3]
  • "Absence or non-recognition of authority and order in any given sphere."[4]

Rady Ananda

Last month, the new Afghanistan parliament passed the "Shia Family Law" which legitimates marital rape and child marriage for Shia Muslims who make up ~15% of the population. At least 300 women protested the law, with their faces exposed. Nearly 1,000 Afghan men and their slaves turned maniacal and stoned the protesters. Police struggled to keep the two groups apart, reports the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

Supporters of the law redefine 'rape' to fit their narrow patriarchal views. Forced sexual relations, to them, is about loyalty to the husband. One counter-protester reportedly described rape as marital infidelity – by the wife!

"Rape is what you see in the West where men don't feel responsibility for their wives and leave them to go with several men."

Well, honey, that is not the definition of rape. That's called cheating. Afghan protesters object to insane Taliban views that promote stoning women to death for perceived affronts to their masculine godview:

Last week widespread objection erupted to the stoning of a 16-year-old for leaving her house with a male non-family member, while the man was left unmolested and unpunished. The Taliban's femicidal misogyny is infamous, world wide. RAWA and others hope to neutralize the psychopathic influence of Taliban thought in the Middle East.

Afghanistan is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, except when it conflicts with their religion. How convenient.

Treating Shia women separately than all other citizens sets them up for violence, as the counter-protesters proved. RAWA tracks this violence, posting photos, reports and, recently, its statement on the 7th Anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan:

Neither the US nor Jehadies and Taliban,Long Live the Struggle of Independent and Democratic Forces of Afghanistan!

"The government of President Hamid Karzai has said the Shiite family law is being reviewed by the Justice Department and will not be implemented in its current form. Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned the legislation, and President Barack Obama has labeled it 'abhorrent.'

"Though the law would apply only to the country's Shiites - 10 to 20 percent of Afghanistan's 30 million people - it has sparked an uproar by activists who say it marks a return to Taliban-style oppression. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, required women to wear all-covering burqas and banned them from leaving home without a male relative.

"Shiite backers of the law say that foreigners are meddling in private Afghan affairs, and Wednesday's demonstrations brought some of the emotions surrounding the debate over the law to the surface.

"'You are a dog! You are not a Shiite woman!' one man shouted to a young woman in a headscarf holding aloft a banner that said 'We don't want Taliban law.' The woman did not shout back at the man, but told him: 'This is my land and my people.'

"Women protesting the law said many of their supporters had been blocked by men who refused to let them join the protest. Those who did make it shouted repeatedly that they were defending human rights by defending women's rights and that the law does not reflect the views of the Shiite community.

"Fourteen-year-old Masuma Hasani said her whole family had come out to protest the law - both her parents and her younger sister who she held by the arm.

"'I am concerned about my future with this law,' she said. 'We want our rights. We don't want women to just be used.'"

This 10-minute 2006 phone-video evidences the murder by stoning of a teen girl who favored a boy outside her religious sect. The boy, of course, went unharmed. The femicidal maniacs cheered their actions, several taking pictures. Bloodlust fueled the men; they twirtled like banshees when her head cracked open and blood pored onto the street. Finally, the mob dragged her off.

Gotta love US influence in the Middle East. We sure "brought democracy" over there. Earlier this month, UK Gay News reported that 100 Iraqis face imminent execution for being gay.

Despite Obama's "abhorrence" at legitimizing marital rape, RAWA is not happy with US foreign policy in Afghanistan:

"The US 'War on terrorism' removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another. The US government and Mr. Karzai mostly rely on Northern Alliance criminal leaders who are as brutal and misogynist as the Taliban."

OpEdNews Senior Editor. In 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists.

Quotes About Hell

God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That's not free will. It's like a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor.- William C. Easttom II

According to Christianity, eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, believe or die. "Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options." --Bill Hicks

(The difficulty over the question of eternal torments lies in) how it is irreconcilable with the Goodness of God, to put any Persons at all upon a necessity of making such an Option, wherein if they choose amiss, the Misery they incur must be irrevocable. –Samuel Clarke, A Letter

So revolting to my moral nature is the creed of eternal punishment that it, more than any other cause, produces the most widespread unbelief. Compared with this, all objections to Christianity fade to insignificance. --Loren Anderson

I have lately taken to read the New Testament which I assure you is a very good book; but there is one article to which I cannot accede; it is that of the eternity of punishment. I cannot comprehend how this eternity is compatible with the goodness of God! –La Fontaine (1621-1695)

"Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven." Paradise Lost, John Milton, English poet (1608 - 1674)

It serves no purpose to man if there is no room for repentance, and he who is tormented can never grow better…let this punishment be severe, let it be bitter, nay let it be lasting, but let it at length have an end… --Thomas Burnet, “A Treatise Concerning the State of Departed Souls"

When all has been considered, it seems to me to be the irresistible intuition that infinite punishment for finite sin would be unjust, and therefore wrong. We feel that even weak and erring Man would shrink from such an act. And we cannot conceive of God as acting on a lower standard of right and wrong.-- Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland), "Eternal Punishment," Diversions and Digressions of Lewis Carrol

Almost no one who has ever studied the near-death experience (NDE) comes away thinking that Hell is eternal.--Dr. Ken Vincent

Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence? –Immanuel Kant, “End of All Things”

A civilized society looks with horror upon the abuse and torture of children or adults. Even where capital punishment is practiced, the aim is to implement it as mercifully as possible. Are we to believe then that a holy God—our heavenly Father—is less just than the courts of men? -- Sidney Hatch

Salvation is universal because the love of God encompasses all. If God is God and if God is love, nothing is outside the love of God. A place like hell is thus inconceivable. --Jacques Ellul

Imagine such a doctrine, you may; but seriously believe in it you never can. The thought is too shocking even to human nature; how much more abhorrent, then, must it be from divine perfection. The Creator must have made all his creatures finally to be happy; and could never form any one whose end he foreknew would be misery everlasting. We can be sure of nothing if we are not sure of this. –Bishop Newton (1704-1782)

The degree and duration of the torment of these degenerate and anti-Christian people, should be no other than would be approved of by those angels who had ever labored for their salvation, and that Lamb who had redeemed them with his most precious blood. –Sir Isaac Newton in his paraphrase of Rev 14:10-11, (1642-1727)

That any should suffer forever, lingering on in hopeless despair, and rolling amidst infinite torments without the possibility of alleviation and without end; that since God can save men and will save a part, he has not proposed to save all-these are real, not imaginary, difficulties. . . . My whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewn with the dying and the dead; and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects, that has given a moment's ease to my tortured min. . . . I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers-upon death-beds and grave-yards-upon the world of woe filled with hosts to suffer for ever: when I see my friends, my family, my people, my fellow citizens when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger-and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do so, I am stuck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.-- Albert Barnes

"Father of Mercies! why from silent earth Didst thou awake and curse me into birth, Tear me from quiet, banish me from night, And make a thankless present of Thy light, Push into being a reverse of Thee And animate a clod with misery?” --Young (Night Thoughts)

They say that when god was in Jerusalem he forgave his murderers, but now he will not forgive an honest man for differing with him on the subject of the Trinity. They say that God says to me, "Forgive your enemies." I say, "I do;" but he says, "I will damn mine." God should be consistent. If he wants me to forgive my enemies he should forgive his. I am asked to forgive enemies who can hurt me. God is only asked to forgive enemies who cannot hurt him. He certainly ought to be as generous as he asks us to be. - Robert Ingersoll

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?" --Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

One of the things that most pains and torments these Japanese is that we teach them that the prison of hell is irrevocably shut. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, of their parents and relatives; and they often show their grief by their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope….and I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none. The grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully; they almost pine away with sorrow….I can hardly restrain my tears sometimes at seeing many so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already done with and can never be undone.-- St. Francis Xavier, a Roman Catholic missionary to Japan, 1552

Again I ask whence it happened that the fall of Adam involved, without remedy, in eternal death so many nations, together with their infant children, except because it so seemed good to God? A decree horrible, I confess, and yet true. – John Calvin

The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell. --Sean Ningen

God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race. - Robert G. Ingersoll

Who would dare so much as to smile, if he really believed endless torments were certain to be the portion of some members of his household--it may be of himself? Marriage would be a crime; each birth the occasion of an awful dread. The shadow of a possible Hell would darken every home, sadden every family hearth. All this becomes evident when we reflect, that to perpetuate the race would be to help on the perpetuation of moral evil. For if this creed be true, out of all the yearly births a stady current is flowing on to help fill the abyss of hell, to make larger and vaster the total moral evil which is to endure forever. 'The world would be one vast madhouse' says the American scholar Hallsted, 'if realizing and continued pressure of such a doctrine was present.'" --Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant, p. 57

I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell. --Robert Ingersoll

Some conservative Christians argue in favor of hell by calling it "God's great compliment." "Compliment?" If hell is such a "compliment" then what does God do when he wants to "insult" somebody?--Ed Babinski

If the Lord of the Flies and the Bible are true, then all people are evil and all who are evil go to hell. Does anyone else think God WANTS to be alone? --Unknown

The fear of hell is the basis for the Christian faith.--Madalyn Murray O'Hare

Speaking on the teaching of Hell, if there is anything consistent among orthodox and traditional teachers on the subject, it would be their inconsistencies and contradictions. --Gary Amirault

Given headaches, backaches, toothaches, strains, scrapes, breaks, cuts, rashes, burns, bruises, PMS, fatigue, hunger, odors, molds, colds, yeast, parasites, viruses, cancers, genetic defects, blindness, deafness, paralysis, mental illness, ugliness, ignorance, miscommunications, embarrassments, unrequited love, dashed hopes, boredom, hard labor, repetitious labor, accidents, old age, senility, fires, floods, earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes and volcanoes, I can not see how anyone, after they are dead, deserves "eternal punishment" as well. --Ed Babinski

People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind matter (...) than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.--Baron d'Holbach

(I find it difficult to believe) that God who is the father of Mercies, that doth in heaven and Earth all that hee will; that hath the hearts of all men in his disposing; that worketh in men both to doe, and to will; and without whose free gift a man hath neither inclination to good, nor repentance of evill, should punish mens transgressions without any end of time and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine and more. –Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Seldom, I suppose, do we find ourselves brooding over the awesome doctrine of eternal punishment. Only on rarest occasions and then fleetingly is our mood that of Roden's famous statue, The Thinker, who sits in mute amazement watching lost souls enter hell. What William Gladstone wrote about eternal punishment in the late 19th century is equally true today: it 'seems to be relegated at present to the far off corners of the Christian mind, and there to sleep in deep shadow. --Dr. Vernon Grounds

Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity. –William Blackstone, on whether the doctrine of Hell was an effective deterrent to crime, 1769

Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. --Albert Einstein

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you! --George Carlin

Think of Jonathan Edwards who thundered the terrors of God and what Hell was like until men grasped their seats and hung on to them, fearing they were falling into Hell itself. Men were moved by fear to escape damnation. That was believed to be Christianity. Why any coward wanted to keep out of Hell. He might not have had one idea in his soul of what was the real true earmark of Christianity. –John G. Lake

Regarding Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment” painting: “…Look at the lower parts of the picture, where with pitchforks men are by devils being cast into cauldrons and into burning fires, where hateful fiends are gnawing at the skulls of suffering sinners, and where there is hellish cannibalism going on. Let a man look at that picture and the scenes which it depicts , and he sees what were the ideas which men once had of Hell and of divine justice. It was a nightmare a hideous as was ever begotten by the hellish brood itself; and it was an atrocious slander on God…I do not wonder that men have reacted from these horrors—I honor them for it. --Henry Ward Beecher.

As a tot I was given the usual terrifying mixed message: a) God is love; and b) If you don't believe how much he loves you, you will stand in the corner for eternity.- James Lileks

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell? --Richard Dawkins

I read in the Gospels that Jesus forgave the men who nailed him to the cross. He even promised "this day you shall be with me in paradise" to a thief crucified next to him -- a thief who addressed Jesus simply as a "man" rather than as "the son of God." Yet, today, this same Jesus cannot forgive my kindly old aunt and allow her to dwell in paradise, simply because her "beliefs" do not match Reverend So-and-So's?- Arthur Silver

When I see what the old rocking continents are doing, and have been doing from the creation, from the days of the flood, through all the treacheries and pitfalls wherein the human race has been reeling and staggering down to modern times; when I look at Asia and Africa and Europe and America and both continents of it and see what the actual condition of the neglected, the stripped, the peeled, the despoiled, the downtrodden races of men has been; if I thought that in addition to all this there was a God that was clothed in thunder, and whose business it was to stand at the door where men go out of life and crush them downward into eternal hell—every instinct of charity, of sympathy and of love that is born in me by Christ, would stand crying, “Annihilate him! Annihilate him!” It would be the sorrow of the universe that would raise this cry. –Henry Ward Beecher

Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being. - Dan Barker

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. --Albert Einstein

Made in the image of God, all humans have a moral sense, a judicial sentiment. Even the unredeemed cringe when the Holocaust is reviewed. Our moral intuition rejects the idea that anyone, human or divine, who endlessly inflicted pain on another could be called "good." --Randy Klassen, "What Does the Bible Really Say About Hell?"

Few people, if they really had the authority, would condemn anyone anyone, even their worst enemy, to a burning, scorching, tormenting, eternal hell. Yet, they expect God to do it! --J. Preston Eby

(Those who) impute such actions to God, as make Him resemble the worst of beings, and so run into downright Demonism. –Matthew Tindal, on eternal punishment/torture “Christianity as Old as Creation” 1730

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains. --Lord Byron

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.—Thomas Paine

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. --Voltaire

For me it is inexplainable how a person who holds the orthodox view [of eternal torment] can at any time have a glad moment in this life. He is constantly mingling with people whose final destiny will be to be tormented eternally without end…To me it is even more inexplainable that such an ‘orthodox’ person can expect even a happy moment in eternity, when he knows that contemporaneously with his blessed estate continues the endless torment and agony of innumerable millions of the accursed. Can he, if he loves his neighbors as himself, yes, even if he has just a little bit of human love and is not solely a selfish wretch, have even a single happy moment? -- John Persone Swedish Lutheran Bishop

The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing that we are not to have in the other world. We are to be so taken up with Jesus and angels, that we shall care nothing about our brothers and sisters that have been damned. We shall be so carried away with the music of the harp that we shall not even hear the wail of father and mother. Such a religion is a disgrace to human nature. –Robert Ingersoll

And yet this same Deity says to me, "resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine." It seems to me that even gods should practice what they preach. --Robert Ingersoll

Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves. --W. Somerset Maugham

Listening to her father preach a hellfire sermon, the pastor’s daughter said, “I wish Jesus was as loving as my father.”

"If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there." Psalm 139:8, The Bible

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.-- Robert Ingersoll

How anyone can believe in eternal punishment, or in any soul which God has made being “lost” and also believes in the love, nay, even in the justice of God is a mystery indeed. ---C.G. Montefiore

I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil. -- Clarence Darrow

An idea, which has terrified millions, claims that some of us will go to a place called Hell, where we will suffer eternal torture. This does not scare me because, when I try to imagine a Mind behind this universe, I cannot conceive that Mind, usually called "God," as totally mad. I mean, guys, compare that "God" with the worst monsters you can think of -- Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, that sort of guy. None of them ever inflicted more than finite pain on their victims. Even de Sade, in his sado-masochistic fantasy novels, never devised an unlimited torture. The idea that the Mind of Creation (if such exists) wants to torture some of its critters for endless infinities of infinities seems too absurd to take seriously. Such a deranged Mind could not create a mud hut, much less the exquisitely mathematical universe around us. - Robert Anton Wilson

God cannot send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow-man. If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep company with such a god. –Robert Ingersoll

I care little in the existence of a heaven or hell; self respect does not allow me to guide my acts with an eye toward heavenly salvation or hellish punishment. I pursue the good in life because it is beautiful and attracts me; and shun the bad because it is ugly and repulsive. All our acts should originate from the spring of unselfish love, whether there be a continuation after death or not. --Heinrich Hein

There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it. –John G. Lake

I cannot believe in an eternity of hell. I hope God will forgive me if I err; but in this matter I cannot say, "Lord help my unbelief." --Robert Southey, 1826

I see the doctrine of hell as being probably the major stumbling block to the return of a de-Christianized world to Christ. The doctrine of eternal damnation, more than any other teaching of the church, produces atheism. If you examine closely all the big name atheists—like Feuerback and Nietzsche—it is this teaching more than any other that offended them and turned them away. Out of these famous atheists came all the movements that have caused so much hell here and now. If God is to practice what He preaches, then it makes it hard to believe in eternal damnation.--Unknown

Your heart will not accept what your mind rejects. --Unknown

Abraham Joshua Heschel:

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. [New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963]

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel:

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

 

Abraham Lincoln:

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

 

Abraham Lincoln:

That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.

 

Abraham Lincoln:

Friends, I agree with you in Providence; but I believe in the Providence of the most men, the largest purse, and the longest cannon. 1854

 

Adlai E. Stevenson:

What do I believe? As an American I believe in generosity, in liberty, in the rights of man. These are social and political faiths that are part of me, as they are, I suppose, part of all of us. Such beliefs are easy to express. But part of me too is my relation to all life, my religion. And this is not so easy to talk about. Religious experience is highly intimate and, for me, ready words are not at hand.

speech, Libertyville, Illinois, May 21, 1954

 

 

Albert Einstein:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

 

Albert Einstein:

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

 

Albert Einstein:

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

 

Albert Einstein:

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his [sic] creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious ourselves.

 

Albert Einstein:

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

The World as I See It, 1934

 

 

Albert Einstein:

Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.

 

Albert Einstein:

Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm, value judgements remain indispensable. Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human thought and actions; it is not qualified to speak of real facts and the relationships between them.

 

Aldous Huxley:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

 

Aldous Huxley:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

 

Alfred North Whitehead:

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

 

Algernon Black:

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.

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Anais Nin:

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

 

Anna Garlin Spencer:

A successful woman preacher was once asked "what special obstacles have you met as a woman in the ministry?" "Not one," she answered, "except the lack of a minister's wife."

 

Anne Frank:

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.

 

Benjamin Franklin:

The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see.

 

Benjamin Franklin:

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

 

Benjamin Whichcote:

Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.

 

Bertrand Russell:

In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. "What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong?" she asked. "I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say?" Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, "Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'"

Al Seckel, in Preface to Bertrand Russell on God and Religion

 

 

Bill Cosby:

For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.

 

Bill Gates:

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

 

Blaise Pascal:

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

 

Brenda Peterson:

The Hopi Indians of Arizona believe that our daily rituals and prayers literally keep this world spinning on its axis. For me, feeding the seagulls is one of those everyday prayers.

 

Carl Jung:

Among all my patients in the second half of life ... there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

 

Carl Sandburg:

Sandburg's retelling of Lincoln's attendance at an evangelist rally led by Peter Cartwright in 1846, in response to accusations by Cartwright's followers that he was an "infidel" - Cartwright was his opponent in his race for Congress:

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!

 

Clarence Darrow:

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.

Scopes trial, Dayton, Tennessee, July 13, 1925

 

 

D. H. Lawrence:

A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it, and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

 

David Halverstam:

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time . . . president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

 

Diderot:

A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist. (paraphrased)

 

Don Hirschberg:

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.

 

E. B. White:

Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

 

Elbert Hubbard:

Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one.

The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

 

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in it.

 

Emily Dickinson:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

 

Emily Dickinson:

The Bible is an antique Volume—
Written by faded men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres—
Subjects—Bethlehem—
Eden—the ancient Homestead—
Satan—the Brigadier—
Judas—the Great Defaulter—
David—the Troubador—
Sin—a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist—
Boys that "believe" are very lonesome—
Other Boys are "lost"—
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller—
All the Boys would come—
Orpheus' Sermon captivated—
It did not condemn—

 

F. Forrester Church:

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

 

Felix Adler:

Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.

 

Felix Adler:

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.

An Ethical Philosophy of Life

 

 

Felix Adler:

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

 

Felix Adler:

Religion is a wizard, a sibyl . . .
She faces the wreck of worlds, and prophesies restoration.
She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn.
She faces death, and prophesies life.

 

Frederick Buechner:

Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.

 

Frederick Douglass:

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!

 

Frederick Douglass:

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

 

Friedrich Schleiermacher:

The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.

 

G Gaia:

The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.

AOL Member

 

 

G.K. Chesterton:

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

 

Galileo Galilei:

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

 

Galileo Galilei:

The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

 

George J. Mitchell:

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

 

Goethe:

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

 

H. L. Mencken:

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 

H. L. Mencken:

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

 

HH the Dalai Lama:

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

 

HH the Dalai Lama:

Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.

 

HH the Dalai Lama:

We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.

 

Harvey Cox:

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by ... religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

The Seduction of the Spirit, 1973

 

 

Helen Keller:

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

 

Howard Nemerov:

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

 

Immanuel Kant:

Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

New York Times, December 3, 1978

 

 

Isaiah Berlin:

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

 

James Baldwin:

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

 

James Feibleman:

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

 

James Luther Adams:

The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions -- social, economic, and political -- of the common life.

 

James Martineau:

Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.

 

Jessamyn West:

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

The Quaker Reader, 1962

 

 

Joan B. Campbell:

[Jesus'] ministry was clearly defined, and the alternatives to the illusion and temptations of the desert were spelled out. A choice was made -- life abundant, full, and free for all. Make no mistake about it, the day that choice was made, Jesus became suspect. That day in the temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him. How was the world to understand one who rejected an offer of power and control?

Sojourners, August-September, 1991

 

 

John Dewey:

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy

 

 

John Dewey:

The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.

 

John Gardner:

One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.

NYT Book Review, Jan 1983

 

 

John Godfrey Saxe:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
 

1887: referring to the Buddhist fable of the Blind Sages and the Elephant, found in the Udana, chapter 6, section 4

 

 

John Warwick Montgomery:

The difficulty with pragmatic arguments for a religion is that truths do not always "work", and beliefs that "work" are by no means always true.

 

Jonathan Swift:

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

 

Jonathan Swift:

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

 

Karl Marx:

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

 

Kenneth Patton:

Mankind has always been but one humanity. We still are. It may even be prophesied that we probably always will be. Our great problem is and has been for ages, how to live with each other, with our fellow human beings. Religion in its core is what Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tzu and all the other sages have declared it to be: loving one another.

 

Louisa May Alcott:

Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come.

in Little Women, chapter 36

 

 

Lucille Ball:

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.

 

Mark Morrison-Reed:

The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed.

 

Mark Twain:

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

1908, notebook

 

 

Mark Twain:

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion –- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

 

Mark Twain:

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

 

Mark Twain:

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Autobiography, 1959

 

 

Matthew Arnold:

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
Forever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look'd on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.

 

Matthew Arnold:

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

 

Milton Yinger:

Religion can be defined as a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life.

 

Mohandas Gandi:

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Truth is my God. Nonviolence is my way of realizing Him.

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

 

Noam Chomsky:

Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

 

Paul Ricoeur:

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

 

Paul Tillich:

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

Saturday Evening Post, June 14, 1958

 

 

Paul Tillich:

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.

 

Pearl S. Buck:

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

 

Pearl S. Buck:

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

 

Peter F. Drucker:

There are no creeds in mathematics.

 

Protagoras:

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

 

Ralph Sockman:

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

 

Rebecca West:

Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

 

Richard Francis Burton:

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

 

Robert A. Heinlein:

One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.

 

Robert Benson:

All of the places of our lives are sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples. And all of the people in our lives are saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them.

 

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Many people think they have religion when they are troubled with dyspepsia.

 

Robert Ingersoll:

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

 

Sharon Welch:

An appropriate symbol for the process of celebrating life, enduring limits, and resisting injustice ... is the beloved community.... The beloved community names the matrix within which life is celebrated, love is worshipped, and partial victories over injustice lay the groundwork for further acts of criticism and courageous defiance. From within the matrix of beloved community, there is a solid basis for social critique and self criticism: the life-giving love constitutive of solidarity with the oppressed and love of oneself. [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]
 

 

Sigmund Freud:

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

 

Sir Julian Huxley:

Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.

The New Divinity

 

 

Sophia Lyon Fahs:

Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.

 

Susan B. Anthony:

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

 

T.S. Eliot:

Any religion...is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

Selected Essays, 1927

 

 

Theodore Dreiser:

If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.

(attributed)

 

 

Thich Nhat Hanh:

You who are journalists, writers, citizens, you have the right and duty to say to those you have elected that they must practice mindfulness, calm and deep listening, and loving speech. This is universal thing, taught by all religions.

 

Thomas Erskine:

In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.

 

Thomas Hobbes:

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

Leviathan

 

 

Thomas Jefferson:

Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

 

Thomas Jefferson:

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

 

Thomas Jefferson:

I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged.

1816, in a letter to Mrs. H. Harrison Smith

 

 

Thomas Jefferson:

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

 

Thomas Jefferson:

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

 

Thomas Moore:

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

 

Thomas Paine:

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

 

Thomas Paine:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of humans; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

 

Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

All ... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.

 

Unknown:

Some children's answers to church school questions - from the Church of England:

This entry continued ...
 

Voltaire:

If God did not exist it would be necessary for us to invent Him.

 

Voltaire:

When it's a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

 

Walt Whitman:

In the faces of men and women I see God.

 

Walter Savage Landor:

Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him.

 

Willa Cather:

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. (Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927)

 

William Hazlitt:

Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretences to both.

 

William James:

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

 

 

William O. Douglas:

Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

opinion, United States v. Ballard, 1944

 

 

William Robertson Smith:

Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.

 

William Robertson Smith :

But we must not forget... this ritual expressed... certain ideas which lie at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relations between man and man.

 

William Robertson Smith :

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.

 

Yossi Klein Halevi:

But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.

Thank you for friends, love, taste-buds, pens and paper, oranges and bananas, games, ideas, big squishy beautiful brains, vehicles, fish, birds, cats, dogs , animals in general, plants, rocks , grass, glass, trails, no trails, the 6 senses, lessons, questions, answers, art, Art and all other proper nouns, verbs, languages, frogs, amphibians and reptiles in general, insects, food, mushrooms for the head and tummy, pens ,pencils, paper, mediums, measurements, diversity, diversity, and diversity, the right to repeat myself, communications, digestion, functions in general, education, comics, comets, unknowns, constants and variables, birth, death, and that space in between., computers, really smart people, people in general, today and yesterday, tomorrow, memories, cleansing tears, emotions in general..........night and day , rain, snow, sunshine, flowers, oceans and seas, boats,  once again life and everything included. ad infinitum...

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today.  Have you used one to say "thank you?"  ~William A. Ward


The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts.  No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.  ~H.U. Westermayer


Gratitude is the memory of the heart.  ~Jean Baptiste Massieu, translated from French


Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.  ~G.B. Stern


If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.  ~Meister Eckhart


If you have lived, take thankfully the past.  ~John Dryden


When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?  ~G.K. Chesterton


The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.  ~John E. Southard


As each day comes to us refreshed and anew, so does my gratitude renew itself daily.  The breaking of the sun over the horizon is my grateful heart dawning upon a blessed world.  ~Adabella Radici


I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ~G.K. Chesterton


You say grace before meals.  All right.  But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.  ~G.K. Chesterton


For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson


If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get.  ~Frank A. Clark


The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal.  It's a way to live.  ~Attributed to Jacqueline Winspear


Praise the bridge that carried you over.  ~George Colman


If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.  ~Robert Quillen


He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.  ~Epictetus


What a miserable thing life is:  you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.  ~Bertolt Brecht, Jungle of Cities, 1924


Gratitude is the best attitude.  ~Author Unknown


Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.  ~W.T. Purkiser


We thank Thee, O Father of all, for... all the soul-help that sad souls understand.  ~Will Carleton


We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  ~Thornton Wilder


Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.  ~William Faulkner


If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness.  It will change your life mightily.  ~Gerald Good


Gratitude is the least of the virtues, but ingratitude is the worst of vices.  ~Thomas Fuller


There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude.  It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance.  ~Joseph Addison


I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.  ~R.H. Blyth


Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.  ~Henry Clay


Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.  ~Estonian Proverb


Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.
~George Herbert


The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition


Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?  ~George Canning


As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.  ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy


We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.  ~Cynthia Ozick


Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.  ~Horace


The grateful person, being still the most severe exacter of himself, not only confesses, but proclaims, his debts.  ~Robert South


Grow flowers of gratitude in the soil of prayer.  ~Verbena Woods


Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.  ~Aldous Huxley


When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.  ~Chinese Proverb


Thanks are justly due for boons unbought.  ~Ovid


In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.  ~H.L. Mencken


Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  ~William Arthur Ward


Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel.  ~Author Unknown

I cannot wait for some burning flame of passion

dancing muses and tears mingled with ink

I refuse to bear the silence one more day

sometimes a torrent or freshly fallen snow

I go I go

I cannot let my fingers grow cold and clumsy

I dare not let my mind grow dim

the"I' that i am

may some day be referred to as "Him" 

whether that be true or no

I go I go

I go to that place that haunted place

wherein dwells the spectre of my own doubts and fears

failure awaits you he shrieks like a wraith

He's no ghost, He's a wadded up piece of paper

Join the others

you go  you go

     The snow silences everything except the sound of my shoes and the deafening roar of the absence of yours.  Luna should be walking now, but she would practically be buried in these drifts.  Fourteen months ago in the early fall, by that white lump,  In the early fall it's a log.   It was misty and warm then and Luna came to be , between the waves of mist there were stars.  Oh the stars,  The taste of the mist mingled with the taste of your body, I'll never forget.  I miss you.

WRITING IS HEAVEN
 

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Thomas Berger

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.
Steven Brust

The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain.
George Buchanan

Every word written is a victory against death.
Michel Butor

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.
Jack Dann

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.
Monica Dickens

Writing counts.
Allyson Dickey

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Catherine Drinker Bowen

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.
James T. Farrell

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.
Melinda Haynes

Writing wasn’t easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It’s wonderful!
Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

 

There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.
Edward Gibbon

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver

No one is able to enjoy such feast than the one who throws a party in his own mind.
Selma Lagerlöf

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Anne Lamott

Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity.
Natalia Laurila

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
John D. MacDonald

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.
Jules Renard

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.
Leo Rosten

Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.
J. Michael Straczynski

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
Brenda Ueland

I can’t help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I’m not in the middle of some literary project, I’m utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down.
Kaari Utrio

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola

Writing is only boring to the people who are boring themselves.
Unknown

WRITING IS HELL
 

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
Honore de Balzac

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
Jorge Luis Borges

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.
Poppy Z. Brite

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?
Bennett Cerf

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder.  Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
Harlan Ellison

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
William Faulkner

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Gustave Flaubert

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.
James Jones

It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky on january. But, as any creative person will tell you, there are days when there's absolutely nothing sweeter than creating something from nothing.
Richard Krzemien

Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God.
Sidney Sheldon

People are certainly impressed by the aura of creative power which a writer may wear, but can easily demolish it with a few well-chosen questions. Bob Shaw has observed that the deadliest questions usually come as a pair: "Have you published anything?" – loosely translated as: I've never heard of you – and "What name do you write under?" – loosely translatable as: I've definitely never heard of you.
Brian Stableford

Writing is the flip side of sex – it's good only when it's over.
Hunter S. Thompson

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valery

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
Jessamyn West

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.
William Zinsser

Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Anonymous

WRITING AS WORK
 

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
Russell Baker

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
Ray Bradbury

I don't think it is possible to give tips for finding one's voice; it's one of those things for which there aren't really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible.
Poppy Z. Brite

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
Clarence Budington Kelland

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
Raymond Chandler

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.
Agatha Christie

Life is what happens to a writer between drafts.
Damon (aka Dennis R. Miller)
…who spent 25 years completing his novel The Perfect Song.

I believe that in a good collaboration, the authors bring their strengths to the story; one author's strength cancels the other author's weakness, and back and forth it goes.
Jack Dann

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
William Faulkner

You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.
Dorothy C. Fontana

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby.
Paavo Haavikko

Writing is physical work. It's sweaty work. You just can't will yourself to become a good writer. You really have to work at it.
Will Haygood

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over....
John Hersey

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
Eugene Ionesco

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Thomas Jefferson

When we read, we stat at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.
Vickie Karp

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
Stephen King

Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then have to ask them to leave.
Marc Lawrence

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Ursula K. LeGuin

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.
Ursula K. LeGuin

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
Ursula K. LeGuin

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer.
Stephen Leigh

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.
H. P. Lovecraft

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.
Samuel Lover

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
Somerset Maugham

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.
Ken MacLeod

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
Somerset Maugham

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friederich Nietzsche

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
Vladimir Nabokov

I write to tell stories. I believe that there a some professions in the world that will last forever: doctor or a nurse, teacher, builder and a storyteller. I write also to become myself, more so day by day. Writing is a way to shape out visible and invisible, in myself as well as in the world.
Eppu Nuotio

One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
Niyi Osundare

Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.
Edgar A. Poe

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
Terry Pratchett

Writing energy is like anything else. The more you put in, the more you get out.
Richard Reeves

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter de Vries

God sells us all things at the price of the labor.
Leonardo da Vinci

An artist's career always begins tomorrow
James Whistler

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.
P. G. Wodehouse

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.
P. G. Wodehouse
...after being asked about his writing technique

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
Jane Yolen

WRITING AND MONEY
 

There's a sucker born every minute.
Phineas T. Barnum

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley

I got to thinking about the point in every freelancer's life where he has to decide whether he wants to A, have a social life, and do art in his spare time, or B, do art, and have a social life in his spare time. It has always seemed to me that if you have any hope of making a living as an artist – writer, musician, whatever – you absolutely must learn to tell people to leave you alone, and to mean it, and to eject them from your life if they don't respect that. This is necessary not because your job is more important than anyone else's – it isn't – but because a great many people will think of you as not having a job. 'Oh, how wonderful – you can work whenever you want to!' Well, yes, to a point, but generally 'whenever you want to' had better be most of the time, or else you won't have a roof over your head.
Poppy Z. Brite

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.
Richard Curtis

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. Donleavy

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Neil Gaiman

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
Cormac McCarthy

Writing is its own reward.
Henry Miller

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Olin Miller

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
A. A. Milne

In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money.
Ferenc Molnar
...after asked about how he became a writer

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard

Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love.
Melissa Scott

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
Rex Stout

WRITING AND THINKING
 

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
Buddha

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are  certainly worth thinking about.
Arthur C. Clarke

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
Joan Cocteau

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton

I don't have a moral plan. I'm a Canadian.
David Cronenberg

A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion

Consciousness will always be one degree above comprehensibility.
Gösta Carl Henrik Ehrensvärd

In my experience, the best creative work is never done when  one is unhappy.
Albert Einstein

Curiosity has its own reason for existence. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.
Jules Feifer

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E. M. Forster

If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author.
Neil Gaiman

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The human mind is like umbrella. It functions best when open.
Max Gropius

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.
Elbert Hubbard

Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.
Stephen King

Authors who never give you something to disagree with never give you anything to think about.
Michael LaRocca

Stupidity is no excuse of not thinking.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

A man who is a genius and doesn't know it, probably isn't.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Genius is not a quality, but only a quantitative difference in a combination of attributes contained in all persons.
Dr. Ernst Jones

The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.
Jean Malaquais

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
Anais Nin

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
Kurt Vonnegut

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
Tobias Wolff

Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser

SOME WORDS OF ADVICE
 

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.
Rhys Alexander

Writing is a lot easier if you have something to say
Sholem Asch

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
Lord Brabazon

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.
Ray Bradbury

If you have other things in your life - family, friends, good productive day work - these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
David Brin

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.
Poppy Z. Brite

If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.
Poppy Z. Brite

Don't explain why it works; explain how you use it.
Steven Brust

Be like a duck, my mother used to tell me. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.
Michael Caine

In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
L. Sprague de Camp

It only takes one person to change your life – you.
Ruth Casey

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it.
Charles Caleb Cotton

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
G. K. Chesterton

Always make sure you are right and then - go for it.
David Crockett

Never throw up on an editor.
Ellen Datlow

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.
T. S. Eliot

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.
Edna Ferber

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
E. M. Forster

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
Neil Gaiman

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
Neil Gaiman

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.
Neil Gaiman

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.
John Gardner

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
William Gibson

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.
Natalie Goldberg

Put weather in.
Joseph Hansen

My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.
Helen Hayes

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talk about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.
Ernst Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
Ernest Hemingway

You have to have a lot of patience to learn patience.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

In order for you to be yourself, you have to be somebody first.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The exit is usually where the entrance was.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.
Joseph Joubert

Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.
Helen Keller

There will never be another now -
I'll make the most of today.
There will never be another me -
I'll make the most of myself.
Helen Keller

Don't take life so serious. It ain't no-hows permanent.
Walt Kelly

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.
Stephen King

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
Stephen King

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
Elmore Leonard

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'. Otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster
Gustav Mahler

For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it’ll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.
Robin McKinley

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Herman Melville

For all my longer works, for example novels, I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.
Garth Nix

One has to live a life that creates a writer.
Erno Paasilinna

We writers have this saying 'Kill your darlings'... but I suppose you family men don't agree with it.
Mike Pohjola

Make it new.
Ezra Pound

You only pass through this life once, you don't come back for an encore.
Elvis Presley

Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know."
Daniel Quinn

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin

Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.
Stanley Schmidt

To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.
Pat Schneider

If you don't know it, don't write it.
Darrell Schweitzer

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.
William Shakespeare

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.
Will Shetterly

Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.
Will Shetterly

Stories have a beginning, a midlle and an end. But not necessarily in that order.
Robert Silverberg

The first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book.
Mickey Spillane

When in doubt, blow something up.
J. Michael Straczynski

You are what you read.
Esko Valtaoja

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
Kurt Vonnegut

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned.
Oscar Wilde

If you think that something small cannot make a difference, try going to sleep with a mosquito in the room.
Anonymous

ABOUT IDEAS
 

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death.
John Aldridge

Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man’s.
William Blake

Everething that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story.
Tapani Bagge

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
Orson Scott Card

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather

If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.
William Campbell Gault

When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein

The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot

All good ideas arrive by chance.
Max Ernst

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on  a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner

There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up.
Raymond Feist

Observe, don't imitate.
John M. Ford

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.
Neil Gaiman

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.
Neil Gaiman

The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.
James Gunn

Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
Catherine O'Hara

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley

I'm not sure I would have ever started to draw, let alone write, if my childhood hadn't been so happy. It was a mixture of comfort and adventure. An excellent mixture!
Tove Jansson

Every bush can burn if you fire it with your imagination.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

And if I have to be a thieving, immoral crow in order to write a book, then by God, I'll grow black feathers on my fanny and croak as loud as I can.
Pasi Jääskeläinen

I hated school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.
Stephen King

I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk
Stephen King

It is crazy even to ask what creativity is. It would be just as useful to interview a caraway plant in your garden and ask: “How did you decided to be a spice?“
Eeva Kilpi

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
Louis L’Amour

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London

The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann

The first step to becoming a better writer is believing your own experience is worth writing about.
Peter Marmorek

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H.L. Mencken

When you take stuff from one writer, it's plagiarism. But when you take it from many writers, it's research.
William Mizner

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet live very little.
Michel de Montaigne

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.
Neal Stephenson

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
Wislawa Szymborska

No tale is so good... but can be spoilt in the telling.
Terence, 160 BC

How vain it is to sit down to write if you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt Vonnegut

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it.
Lawrence Watt-Evans

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an  idea at all.
Oscar Wilde

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which coms always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.
Woodrow Wilson

TRUTH AND FICTION
 

Writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked.
Christina Baldwin

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
Otto von Bismarck

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
Anton Chekhov

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Joseph Conrad

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
Philip K. Dick

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.
Neil Gaiman

Story is to human beings what the pearl is to the oyster.
Joseph Gold

Our lives with all their miracles and wonders are merely a discontinuous string of incidents – until we create the narrative that gives them meaning
Arlene Goldbard

Why would anybody lie? The truth is always more colourful.
Jerry Hall

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down.
W. B. Kinsella

Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths – paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation.
Arthur Kleinman

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.
Nancy Kress

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.
Maimonides

I once asked Barbara Stanwyck the secret of acting. She said: 'Just be truthful – and if you can fake that, you've got it made'.
Fred McMurray

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
Katherine Paterson

No tale tells all.
Alexei Panshin

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
Elvis Presley

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
Frederic Raphael

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
Tom Stoppard

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
Ivana Trump
...upon finishing her first novel

Get you facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.
Mark Twain

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
Mark Twain

ABOUT CHARACTERS
 

First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him.
Ray Bradbury

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.
Anatole Broyard

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
William Faulkner

In nearly all good fiction, the basic - all but inescapable - plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, perhaps including his own doubts, and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.
John Gardner

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Stephen King

The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
Robert Oppenheimer

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself. It's far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
Mark Twain

I never started from ideas but always from character.
Ivan Turgenev

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head and as you get older, you become more skillful casting them.
Gore Vidal

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
Eudora Welty

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.
Hilma Wolitzer

Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.
Jack Woodford

CREATING DRAMA
 

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.
Raymond Chandler

Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.
John Cleese

All romances end in tragedy. One of the key people in a romance becomes a monster sooner or later.
David Cronenberg

Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.
Colin Greenland

Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.
Colin Greenland

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict and conflict.
James Frey

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock

The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds.
Harold Hayes

In a good play, everyone is in the right.
Fredrich Hebbel

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
Helen Keller

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Ursula K. LeGuin

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
Alice Munro

We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable.
Vincent Price

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Mordecai Richler

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion -- many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.
Stanley Schmidt

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that exalted, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
George Bernard Shaw

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
Tom Stoppard

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
Kurt Vonnegut

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
Kurt Vonnegut

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.
H.G. Wells

A story isn't about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.
W. D. Wetherell

I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
Gene Wolfe
...commenting about the future of book publishing technology

EMOTIONS AND COMMUNICATION
 

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road.
Henry Ward Beecher

It is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
Anthony Burgess

In good writing, words become one with things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Robert Frost

The writer who cares more about words than about story – characters, action, setting, atmosphere – is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart – and its cargo – from the horse.
John Gardner

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
John Gardner

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
L P. Hartley

Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock

Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.
Jean Houston

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Z.N. Hurston

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
Carl Gustav Jung

If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.
James J. Kilpatrick

We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.
Arthur Kleinman

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids… Just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. LeGuin

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.
Audre Lorde

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
Marcell Marceau

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
Somerset Maugham

If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.
Edward J. O'Brien

I write to become understood. After I had published my first novel many people started ethusiaticly commenting it. I had tried to talk about the same things in normal conversation, but my message hadn’t gone through. Now I found a channel for it.
Raija Oranen

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.
Richard Peck

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
V. S. Pritchett

Everything changes when you change.
Jim Rohn

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams

If the sex scene doesn't make you want to do it - whatever it is they're doing - it hasn't been written right.
Sloan Wilson

Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us.
Susan Wittig Albert

Storytelling is healing. As we reveal ourselves in story, we become aware of the continuing core of our lives under the fragmented surface of our experience. We become aware of the multifaceted, multichaptered ' I ' who is the storyteller. We can trace out the paradoxical and even contradictory versions of ourselves that we create for different occasions, different audiences... Most important, as we become aware of ourselves as storytellers, we realize that what we understand and imagine about ourselves is a story. And when we know all this, we can use our stories to heal and make ourselves whole.
Susan Wittig Albert

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.
Diana Wynne Jones

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.
Kurt Vonnegut

THE READER
 

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.
Poul Anderson

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
Matthew Arnold

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
Gerald Brenan

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

Those who write clearly have readers. Those who write obscurely have commentators.
Albert Camus

The virtue of books is to be readable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
Samuel Johnson

I keep six honest serving men
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
and How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling

Your stuff starts out being just for you… but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.
Stephen King

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula Le Guin

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
John D. MacDonald

Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader.
Robin McKinley

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
Anne McCaffrey

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. Mencken

Anything you have to acquire a taste for was not meant to be eaten.
Eddie Murphy

The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
Larry Niven

It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.
Larry Niven

Be anything you want to be, but don't be dull.
Frank Robinson

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
David Sedaris

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write my books so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded!
Sidney Sheldon

Editors also know that the people who are really readers want to read. They hunger to read. They will forgive a vast number of clumsinesses and scamped work of every sort if the author will delight them just enough to keep them able to continue.
William Sloane

The main question to a novel is - did it amuse? Were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? Did you mistake eleven for ten? Were you too late to dress? And did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a

The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness.  You have to catch it yourself.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.  ~Jacques Prévert


If you want to be happy, be.  ~Leo Tolstoy


Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.  ~Palmer Sondreal


Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.  ~Robert Anthony


The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.  ~Mark Twain


If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.  ~Edith Wharton


Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place.  But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.  ~E.L. Konigsburg


Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.  ~Cynthia Nelms


Happiness is always a by-product.  It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.  But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.  ~Robertson Davies


Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.  ~Norm Papernick


Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys.  If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.  ~Fyodor Dostoevsky


What a wonderful life I've had!  I only wish I'd realized it sooner.  ~Colette


The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.  ~James Openheim


Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.  ~John Barrymore


"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think.  Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.  ~A.A. Milne


People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness.  Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.  ~H. Jackson Browne


It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness.  Poverty and wealth have both failed.  ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard


Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier.  The way it actually works is the reverse.  You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.  ~Margaret Young


Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.  ~St. Augustine


Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


There are two things to aim at in life:  first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it.  Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931


This is my "depressed stance."  When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand.  The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better.  If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this.  ~Charlie Brown


Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
~William Wordsworth, 1806


Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.  ~Abraham Lincoln


Happiness is a form of courage.  ~Holbrook Jackson


We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.  ~Jean de La Bruyere


Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.  ~Christian Nestell Bovee


We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.  ~Frederick Keonig


Happiness pulses with every beat of my heart.  ~Emily Logan Decens


It's never too late to have a happy childhood.  ~Berke Breathed


Happiness is the soundtrack of my life.  ~Grey Livingston


Happiness?  That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.  ~Albert Schweitzer


Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.  ~Eleanor Roosevelt


Happiness is a direction, not a place.  ~Sydney J. Harris


Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.  ~Janet Lane


A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour.  ~Author Unknown


If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.  ~Dalai Lama


Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.  ~Author Unknown


There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.  ~Lady Blessington


The best vitamin to be a happy person is B1.  ~Author Unknown


A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.  ~Bernard de Fontenelle


Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?  ~Yevgeny Zamyatin


Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.  ~Immanuel Kant


Man must search for what is right, and let happiness come on its own.  ~Johann Pestalozzi


He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.  ~Sigmund Freud


There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.  ~Salvador Dali