Paul Valery, Cornelius Van Til, Laurence M. Vance, Mike Vanderboegh, Johnny Vander Meer, Prof. Robert G. Vaughn, Bill Veeck, Gore Vidal, Leonardo da Vinci,  Virgil, Voltaire, Kurt Vonnegut
 


"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."

Paul Valery

"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them."

Paul Valery
"Agnosticism is epistemologically self-contradictory on its own assumptions because its claim to 
make no assertion about ultimate reality rests upon a most comprehensive assertion about 
ultimate reality."

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987)

"The only ones who "owe it" to the country to fight in unconstitutional, unjust, immoral, and unnecessary wars of aggression are the pathetic chickenhawks, the diehard armchair warriors, the "conservative" apologists for President Bush, the Republican Party loyalists, the writers for National Review, the unholy Christian warmongers, and anyone else calling for more money to be spent and more troops to be sent to fight the terrible waste of money and lives that is the war in Iraq."
Laurence M. Vance, "Should Christians Support Slavery?" [November 25, 2006]
"Anyone who tells you that 'It Can't Happen Here' is whistling past the graveyard of history. There is no 'house rule' that bars tyranny coming to America. History is replete with republics whose people grew complacent and descended into imperial butchery and chaos."

Mike Vanderboegh, (1953- )



"Kids are always chasing rainbows, but baseball is a world where you can catch them."

Johnny Vander Meer, Pitcher, Cinncinnati Reds (1914-1997)

"Authoritarian governments are defined by ready government access to information about the activities of citizens and by extensive limitations on the ability of citizens to obtain information about the government. In contrast, democratic governments are marked by significant restrictions on the ability of government to acquire information about its citizens and by ready access by citizens to information about the activities of government."

Professor Robert G. Vaughn, summarizing the thesis of Alan Westin in  "Privacy and Freedom" 


"Baseball's unique possession, the real source of our strength, is the fan's memory of the times his daddy took him to the game to see the great players of his youth. Whether he remembers it or not, the excitement of those hours, the step they represented in his own growth, and the part those afternoons - even one afternoon - played in his relationship with his father are bound up in his feeling toward the local ballclub and toward the game."


Bill Veeck, 1914-1986, HOF
"I have discovered, in twenty years of moving around a ball park, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats."

Bill Veeck

"That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on the ball."

Bill Veeck

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."
 
Gore Vidal, (1925 - )

"I was shocked to find that my grandfather (Senator T.P. Gore) had no high opinion of Lincoln's prose. When I recited the Gettysburg Address for him, he took me back of the music to the sense of the speech, which appalled him. Lincoln was celebrating the men that he had caused to die in a war of his own making, to preserve a union of states that did not choose, a number of them, to be united. As for government of, by, and for the people, that was perfect nonsense and Lincoln knew that it was."

Gore Vidal, "Screening History", p69

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."
 
Gore Vidal

"Our people tend to isolationism and it always takes a lot of corporate manipulation, as well as imperial presidential mischief, to get them into foreign wars.

[O]ur more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of.

Since George Washington, the isolationist has always had the best arguments. But since corporate money is forever on the side of foreign adventure, money has kept us on the move . . .
the United States is the master of the earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown. We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense."

Gore Vidal

"A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held, at great cost, without issues, and with interchangeable candidates."

Gore Vidal

"America is a quarter of a billion people totally misinformed and disinformed by their government. This is tragic but our media is - I wouldn't even say corrupt - it's just beyond telling us anything that the government doesn't want us to know."

Gore Vidal

"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. �We have a single system,' he wrote, and 'in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.'"

Gore Vidal - The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
 
"These presidential ninnies should stick to throwing out baseballs and leave the important 
matters to serious people."

Gore Vidal
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand."

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 - 1519
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"All our sweetest hours fly fastest."

Virgil (70 bc - 19 bc)
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"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as
possible from one class of citizens to give to the other."

Voltaire, [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)

 
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated."

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."


"Animals have these advantages over man: they have no theologians to 
instuct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits
over their wills."

 

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished 
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

 
"The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars who reason badly, and 
who, not being able to understand the Creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have 
recourse to the hypothesis of the eternity of things and of inevitability."

Philosophical Dictionary [1764]

"Most of the great men of this world live as if they were atheists. Every man who has lived with 
his eyes open, knows that the knowledge of a God, his presence, and his justice, has not the 
slightest influence over the wars, the treaties, the objects of ambition, interest, or pleasure, in 
the pursuit of which they are wholly occupied."

"What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error;
let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature."

"Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity."

"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."

Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
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"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

"Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong."

"Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too."

"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it."

"A company of tyrants is inaccessible to all seductions."

"All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women."

"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."

"Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law."

"The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then
exercises its power to change the laws in its favor."
< End of Voltaire quotes >
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"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
 
Kurt Vonnegut

"Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don't hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance."

Kurt Vonnegut, 'A Man Without a Country', p69

"The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there."

Kurt Vonnegut, 'A Man Without a Country', p78
 
"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a 
person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

Kurt Vonnegut
"....I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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