“But when you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might've been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“So I want to thank the Pentagon, the Soviet Union and the military-industrial complex from the bottom of my heart. Without them, I could never have become the man I am today.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“People are wonderful one at a time. Each one of them has an entire hologram of the universe somewhere within them.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“So I do have this ambivalence. Obviously I'm against militaries, because of what militaries do. In many ways though, the air force was unmilitary-like. They dropped bombs on people, but...they had a golf course.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
“The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the presentation of my ideas is because I see that what’s happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty, the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger, discrimination. This isn’t the violence of some guy opening fire with an Uzi in a McDonald’s and forty people are dead. The real violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over, multiplied a millionfold.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words
George Carlin
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date May 12, 1937
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“Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water. Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase.”
― Aminatta Forna, quote from The Hired Man
“Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began.
"Go on," she said
"The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up."
"People like happy ending, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up."
"I guess not, ma'am. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. And things go well for Anne Elliot in the end, but they don't go well for most people." My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. "I feel let down sometimes. The people in the books-the heroes- they're always so...heroic. And I try to be, but..."
"...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers.
"...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them," and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?"
No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that."
I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there.
"I'm sorry, Miss Wilcox," I said, looking at the floor. "I don't mean to be coarse. I just... I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay."
Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, quote from A Gathering Light
“As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night. At that time, too, they shone automobile lights in the prisoner's face (the Ryazan Cheka—Stelmakh). And at the Lubyanka in 1926 (according to the testimony of Berta Gandal) they made use of the hot-air heating system to fill the cell first with icy-cold and then with stinking hot air. And there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners. The poet Klyuyev was apparently confined in such a cell and Berta Gandal also. A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood began to ooze through your pores. When they saw this happening through the peephole, they would put the prisoner on a stretcher and take him off to sign his confession. The "hot" and "salty" methods of the "gold" period are well known. And in Georgia in 1926 they used lighted cigarettes to burn the hands of prisoners under interrogation. In Metekhi Prison they pushed prisoners into a cesspool in the dark.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1
“When both men had their shirt off, as they did right now, it was like living in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad- a six-pack celebration, complete with triceps and biceps galore.
No doubt about it, Dolphina loved her new job.”
― Suzanne Brockmann, quote from All Through the Night
“The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler’s fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps?”
― Marquis de Sade, quote from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
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