Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."

Carl Sagan, A Demon-Haunted World, 1995

(A Demon-Haunted World was Sagan's penultimate book, he died in 1996 of pneumonia from a form of leukemia at the age of 62.)

If you have a garden and a library you have everything.
--Cicero

On a refrigerator magnet from www.NorthernSun.com. VERY dangerous place for interesting t-shirts.

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower


I wonder if it's an accurate attribution.

"Somebody needs to teach you some class, my friend. You don't go grabbin' somebody else's, somebody's husband's balls, you understand me? That's very disrespectful."
-- Faith Hill, scolding an audience member who grabbed husband Tim McGraw's crotch during a concert