quote/unquote .........

"Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death, we do not exist."
--- Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)

"Now fully dressed and totally out of my mind, I charged into the corridor and down to the elevators. I started to enter one, was blocked in this escape effort by a huge young man in hospital uniform. He was blond, I remember, with a beefy, sneering face. I somehow slipped past him into the elevator but he wouldn't let the doors close. Raging and storming invectives, I rushed back past him to the room where Mother was asking a nurse for smelling salts. Jesus! Then I lit into her with a vengeance. "Why do women bring children into the world and then destroy them?" (I still consider this a rather good question)."
--- "Memoirs" by Tennessee Williams, about a 1969 commitment to Barnes Hospital in STL

"In the 30 years I've worked with refugees, it's the first time I've heard of a situation where refugees are considering going back to a war zone."
--- Bob Carey of the International Rescue Committee, about unemployed Iraqi refugees going back to Iraq to find work (Christian Science Monitor July 19, '09)

"It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable....This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading from the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.... The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five -- well, two and two are five."
--- "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell

(editor's note: quote/unquote, a fairly regular feature of this weblog, is compiled on Arsenal Street in St. Louis by Wilson.)