Sunday, February 26, 2017 – Alternative Facts
Get your facts first. Then you can distort them as you please. ~ Mark Twain
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. ~ John Adams
I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. ~ Will Rogers
Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts. ~ William S. Burroughs
There are no facts, only interpretations. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society. ~ Charles Horton Cooley
The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion. ~ Arnold H. Glasow
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts. ~ George Santayana
Never face facts; if you do you’ll never get up in the morning. ~ Marlo Thomas
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ~ Philip K. Dick
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice. ~ Irving Babbitt
If someone tells you he is going to make a “realistic decision,” you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad. ~ Mary McCarthy
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button. ~ Christopher Lasch
Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil – hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge. ~ Richard M. Weaver
Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature. ~ Auguste Rodin
To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist – life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for. ~ N. C. Thomas
When people have given up on happiness they call themselves “realists.” ~ Marty Rubin
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. ~ Viktor E. Frankl
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. ~ Aldous Huxley
When you’re young, try to be realistic; as you get older, become idealistic. You’ll live longer. ~ Anthony J. D’Angelo
The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic. ~ Pierre Corneille
Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real. ~ Federico Fellini
Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed. ~ John Fiske
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out. ~ Dawn Powell
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. ~ William Arthur Ward
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is. ~ Winston Churchill
Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more. ~ General George S. Patton
I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics. ~ Newt Gingrich
The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack. ~ Sun Tzu
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities. ~ Oscar Wilde
My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack. ~ Marshall Ferdinand Foch
We’re not retreating, Hell! We’re just attacking in different direction! ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. ~ Frederick Douglass
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. ~ H. L. Mencken
Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of clichés the first prize. ~ Saul Bellow
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~ John Quinton
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time. ~ Franklin P. Adams
The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it becomes even more so when, with the application of science, it extends its scope and intensifies the power of its action. If there is a devil in history, it is this power principle. ~ Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin
It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled. ~ F. F. Bosworth
Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you’ve got to be wise enough to know when to leave. ~ Richard Lamm
One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time, one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs. ~ George Orwell
Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
Just Above Sunset 