Quote/Unquote

(editor's note: Wilson in St. Louis returns with another installment of Quote/Unquote, a semiregular feature of The Brazosport News.)

"It's not that these leaders underestimate citizens' intelligence, it's that the leaders' own intelligence is very low. We should ask how these people got to be public servants in the first place."
         -- Chinese academic quoted on NPR today about internal Chinese strife
 
"Yes, I"ve sinned. I"m a sinner. But I enjoyed it. And I've killed men, but the dirty sons-of-bitches deserved it. Any way I look at it, it's too late for no Bible."
     --- character Pretty Boy Floyd in the 1973 movie "Dillinger" directed by John Milius

"Eighty percent of everything built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading -- the jive plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call 'growth.' "
                ---- from "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler (1993)
 
"When I grew up, there weren’t many basketball teams or coaches around, and almost everything about sport was unorganized. There was a lot of play, in the strict sense of the word. We tried on our own to find out what was fun and what worked. My own basketball confidence came to me long before I received any serious coaching, and it paid off later when I took up the game as a profession......It’s the players, not the coaches, owners or commentators, who provide the art in sports. Every good player should think that he may be able to change the game, and he should have the craftsman’s pride and joy in what he does. In most professional sports the best players are unorthodox.”
                       -- Bill Russell in his book "Second Wind" (1979)