Derek > Recent Status Updates

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery."

"the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafe, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it."

"Governments need a separation of powers, legislative checks and balances, and laws legislated as if the party or person we fear the most will acquire the power to wield them."

"Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified."

"They embodied everything crude and despicable that our parents had hoped to leave behind, a long with their childhood pennilessness, in the Third Ward slums, and yet here were our demons got up as our guardians, each with a loaded revolver strapped to his calf..."

"I cannot accept that the religious intolerance emanating from the White House has already so corrupted the ordinary citizen that he has lost all respect for fellow Americans of a creed or faith different from his own."

"For every high-profile would-be 'Christian' leader who has led all-too-willing followers into a battle based on lies, arrogance, greed and the lust for power, there are (thank God) countless unsung heroines and heroes who have heeded the words of Jesus about those who want to be leaders needing to be the servant of all."

"They live in a dream, we live in a nightmare."

"Of all human experiences, death is the most humbling. To be so finally and completely stripped of our ability, to be so tangibly reminded that we are nothing "but dust." No other experience can do for us what death does. I wonder sometimes if this is why we must die. Why the punishment for our pride is final and total humility. Why the cure for our pride is final and total humility."

Perhaps the final and fullest expression of human pride is complete and utter hopelessness, a view of the world that has so dismissed God that nothing matters anymore. Because pride leads us to reject God, we end up trusting ourselves. But..when the brokenness of the world presses in, when we feel the weight of our own helplessness, we succumb to listlessness and despondency. Nothing has purpose. Nothing has meaning.

"America wasn't a fascist country and wasn't going to be...There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution.They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were anti-Semites—as indeed there were among the southerners in FDR's own party—but that was a long way from their being Nazis."

"Lindbergh can deal with Hitler, they said, Hitler respects him because he's Lindbergh. Mussolini and Hirohito respect him because he's Lindbergh. The only ones against him, the people said, are the Jews."

"My intention in running for the presidency...is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war. Your choice is simple. It's not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's between Lindbergh and war."

"Then I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers. Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will."

"Was it unjust? I'd have thought so once, and not long ago. But these activities—whining about what's fair, begging forgiveness, hoping for a miracle—these demand energy, and that was gone from me. Contentment on the other hand demands little, and I drew more and more into it's circle."

"Someday, you know, we're going to be shown the great ledger of our recorded decisions—a dread concept you nonetheless know in your deepest soul is true."

"You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any."

"I saw what she was getting at, but it only needled me, as the honest point often does "

"It sure is one thing to say you're at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with its crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely."

"I saw it happening but could not stop it. Humility came to me too late. I'm a living proverb; learn from me."

"Pride is the rope God allows us all."

"And now, because a story is told for all, an admonition to the mindsick: Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings."

"Once touched by truth...a little thing like faith is easy."

"People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also."

"This peculiar linking-together of opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism—is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them."

"If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate."

"Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expanding labor power without producing anything that can be consumed."

"To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available."

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right."

"At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong."