My Plan Sucked

My grandmother always said: 'God has a plan for all of us.' I should have went along with his, not mine, my plan sucked!

-Mickey Rourke

Uncoordinated Numskulls

I will not be denied the pragmatic, functional utility of anything based on the inept, clumsy, irresponsible failure of brain-dead, uncoordinated numskulls.

-Ted Nugent, "My Gun Control"

Beat Him

If you see a Bulgarian in the street, beat him. He will know why.

-Russian saying

Squirrel Time Machine

To be intellectually honest, I thought the bin Laden tape was good news for Bush, too. And, for now, that doesn't seem to have panned out. Of course, I didn't think that Rove set the whole thing up; nor do I think squirrels have constructed a time machine under my bed using Q-Tips and Mars bars.

-Jonah Goldberg

Sunshine & Lollipops

Liberalism is always one more tutorial away from sunshine and lollipops for everyone.

-Jonah Goldberg, Planned Summit Is Just an Infomercial in Disguise

Monstrous

But this is the antithesis of President Obama's vision of a new Constitution (or a new Bill of Rights) that proclaims what government must do for you rather than what it cannot do to you. Alas, as I've discussed before, while that sounds admirable it is monstrous, since government has nothing to give — it can do for one only by taking from another. If that is to be our system, we are no longer free.

-Andy McCarthy, post at The Corner

Shame and Guilt and Self-hatred

Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal. Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be. There are honest ways to confront that. You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love. Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle. And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is: an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. That’s why they demonize any opposition. To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves. Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

-Andrew Klavan, Frontpage Mag interview

Groupthink

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

-Leo Tolstoy

Setting our hair on fire

But I think the real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn't a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization's craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

-wretchard, comment 132 on this post concerning the Ft. Hood attack

Freedom from Responsibility

What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business possessed of great wealth in which all citizens had a right to share. Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result. If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.

-Edith Hamilton