quote/unquote

the following is an occassional feature provided to us by a reader in St. Louis; we're not sure what it means, but if we had to guess, we'd say it's an attempt to capture the zeitgeist via selected quotes in various media; however, we could be wrong ...


W.C. Fields: "Was I in here last night, and did I spend a $20 bill?"
Bartneder: "Yeah."
W.C. Fields: "Boy, is that a load off my mind... I thought I'd lost it."
*- from "The Bank Dick," role of bartender played by Shemp Howard.

"There was a historian in the 14th century who wrote a book about what he knew of the world, and for that time it was pretty good. One of the interesting observations he made is that all the tribes that have difficulty feeding themselves are lean and healthy and those who have plenty of food are fat, lazy, and unhealthy."
----heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, 99, in Esquire, March '08

"This was a big strategic blunder. It was not a matter of, well, here is the initial decision, but since then we've voted the same way. Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out. The question is, who's making the decision initially to drive the bus into the ditch? And the fact is that Senator Clinton often says that she is ready on day one, but in fact she was ready to give in to George Bush on day one on this critical issue. So the same person that she criticizes for having terrible judgment, and we can't afford to have another one of those, in fact she facilitated and enabled this individual to make a decision that has been strategically damaging to the United States of America."
* Barack Obama in the debate in Cleveland vs. Hillary Clinton, Feb. 26, '08

"It is only unself-conscious activity that bears fruit, and the man who plays a part in a historiacl drama never understands its true significance."
*- Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"