Quips and Quotations (Civics Tested Edition)

7/13/2024

 

1/6/2021

We must cry foul, we must call out the hypocrisy of anyone who would try to condone one and not condemn the other.

--Raphael Warnock

A Tale of Two Cities

 

I was going to do a post on the above but it's just too damn depressing. These shootings are happening so often now they might as well keep the flags permanently at half-mast.

Looking for something else to blog about I decided to travel 213 miles southwest of Nashville to Memphis, where a famous building is once again in the news:

Sneer all you want at the shallowness on display, but if a story like this was the only thing to make the news, the only thing deemed worthy of our attention, then the world in fact would be a much better place. No matter who loses this "fight", it seems farfetched that either Priscilla Presley or Riley Keough will show up at Graceland the next day toting an assault rifle. Their agents wouldn't allow it. And unlike issues involving the widespread availability of firearms or insufficient resources for the mentally ill, local politicians can with all honesty say it's not their problem to solve (in fact, it's up to a court in California, where both participants live.) None of this is to say that the feuding grandmother and granddaughter aren't genuinely distressed by all this, but compared to news elsewhere, I for one find it damn near uplifting.

 

Quips and Quotations

Random violence is incredibly infectious.

--Nicholas D. Kristof

We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.

--Norman Lear
 
Anyone with a gun can go out and commit an act of terrorism, even without a political affiliation.

--Aaron McGruder

What does it tell you that applications for guns since the shooting are up 41 percent in Colorado, and that our cameras found about 50 people in line at one gun shop yesterday outside Denver?

--Brian Williams, shortly after the shootings at Columbine.

Eighty-six percent of the gun death of children under the age of 14 internationally is right here in the United States of America. It is madness.

--Congresswoman Nita Lowry (D-New York)

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

--Isaac Newton

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

--Naomi Wolf

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

--James A. Baldwin

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

--C. Wright Mills
 
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

--Carl Sandburg