Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1126-1128

If you tell a guy in the street you're hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That's something I never understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple-- you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That's what I think about, more than about whose trap its going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what the bastards don't want you to do-- to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable. That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit in your pants over trifles.
Henry Miller,
Tropic Of Capricorn

Montreal has more tall buildings. But wait! The Toronto-Dominion Bank is building the highest skyscraper in the British Commonwealth! Panic over at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce which used to have the highest skyscraper in the British Commonwealth! It must build a higher one: then maybe Toronto will be ahead of Montreal. Nobody seems to think of measuring a city's progress in terms of its park space, or the comparative breadth of its boulevards, or the number of trees still alive in the downtown area, or the size and number of public squares, or the amount of its public housing, or the recognition awarded to its artists. But then parks are for idlers, trees block traffic, there is no tax assessment on public squares, and the quality of a painting is not taken into account in the Gross National Product.

Pierre Berton, The Smug Minority, 1968 p. 22

The withered emasculation of our democratic statesmanship is the withered emasculation of America. The witch-hunting savagery of pompous male sluts in our national halls is that quality of all the people. The petty greed and relentless solicitation of these quasi males is our own. The sacrifice of power, of dignity, or responsibility, of national security and interest to a little patronage or the achievement of a trivial local profit is the measure of our universal loss of aim, purpose, moral worth, view, vision, integrity, and common cause.

The appalling stupidity of these men, highlighted by the ferocious peril of these hours, is the exact measure of the stupidity of the people in our states, cities, towns, and villages. When we condemn them, which we rightly do with nearly every dispatch concerning their multifarious and nonsensical agenda, we condemn ourselves. When we say these men have abandoned their strength to the administration, because of pressure, we state how great has been our own eagerness to lay down the chore of civic duty and let an administration--or nobody--pick up and exploit our united strength.

Philip Wylie

Generation Of Vipers, 1942