Joe > Recent Status Updates

“if he could become master of some great hocus-pocus system which could be made to be graceful to the ears and eyes of many, which might for awhile seem to have within it some semi-divine power of mastering the loaves and fishes, then would they who followed him believe in him more firmly than other followers who had believed in their leaders.”

“Had some inscrutable decree of fate ordained and made it certain, —with a certainty not to be disturbed,—that no candidate could be returned to Parliament who would not assert the earth to be triangular, there would rise immediately a clamorous assertion of triangularity among political aspirants.”

“It was acknowledged everywhere that he had played his part in a noble and even in princely manner, that he had used with a becoming grace the rich things that had been given him….. And yet, perhaps, no man who had lived during the period, or any portion of the period, had done less, or had devoted himself entirely to the consumption of good things without the slightest idea of producing anything in return!”

“He had achieved his place by skill rather than principle, — by the conviction on men’s minds that he was necessary rather than that he was fit.”

“The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick that time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future.”

“Suddenly Newton realized that the man speaking was the President of the United States, and he was speaking the bombast of the hopeless.”

A wild ride!

“What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life,—or rather what were the opinions which floated in the brains of other people concerning it, was a thought which too much floated in his own, and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have been sound asleep.”

“In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.”

"[H]e now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in."

Horrifying and impossible to put down.

"... these people are always gonna to tell themselves that a little fascism is okay as long as they can still get unlimited drinks with brunch!"