Sunday, January 12, 2014 – New Jersey Politics
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old… ~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The curtain rises on a vast primitive wasteland, not unlike certain parts of New Jersey… ~ Woody Allen
The results of a new study are out this week saying that New Jersey is one of the most livable states in the country. The study has a margin of error of 100 percent. ~ Conan O’Brien
Manhattan is a narrow island off the coast of New Jersey devoted to the pursuit of lunch. ~ Raymond Sokolov
I’m sure than in Poland, or somewhere, it is considered cool to drive a Porsche and wear necklaces and black silk, but at least back in Brooklyn if you did those things you were either a drug dealer or from New Jersey. ~ Meg Cabot, Ninth Key
I’ve never been in this part of Trenton before. I don’t feel comfortable driving around buildings that haven’t got gang slogans sprayed on them. Look at this place. No boarded-up windows. No garbage in the gutter. No brothers selling goods on the street. Don’t know how people can live like this. ~ Janet Evanovich, Three to Get Deadly
The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey. ~ Andy Warhol
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
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack. ~ Marshall Ferdinand Foch
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live. ~ Mark Twain
Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth. ~ William Warburton
I have always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: “My God, make our enemies very ridiculous!” God has granted it to me. ~ Voltaire, Letter to M. Damilaville, May 16, 1767
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
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~ John Quinton
Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. ~ Charles Krauthammer
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
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
Politics is applesauce. ~ Will Rogers
Just Above Sunset 