* RE: quote needed
2011-05-31 15:31 ` quote needed Charles Wilson
@ 2011-06-01 21:47 ` Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]
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From: Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E] @ 2011-06-01 21:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: cygwin-talk
Charles Wilson sent the following at Tuesday, May 31, 2011 11:31 AM
>Okay, how about these three from Samuel Clemens:
>
>"The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely
>food for laughter, they are an entire banquet" - Mark Twain
>
>"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world;
>and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve
>men every day who don't know anything and can't read" - Mark Twain
>
>"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any
>copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
>
>and a bonus:
>
>"The only reason people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar
>territory." -- Paul Fix
And from Twain's:
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/p6.htm#c30
The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity
with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands
against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor.
This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel between a person
of their own class and his lord, it was the natural and proper
and rightful thing for that poor devil's whole caste to side with
the master and fight his battle for him, without ever stopping to
inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter. This man had been
out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his work with zeal,
and yet was aware that there was nothing against them but a mere
suspicion, with nothing back of it describable as evidence, still
neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it.
This was depressing--to a man with the dream of a republic in his
head. It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the
"poor whites" of our South who were always despised and frequently
insulted by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base
condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were
yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords in all
political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and
did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in
an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which
degraded them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected
with that pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the
"poor white" did detest the slave-lord, and did feel his own shame.
That feeling was not brought to the surface, but the fact that it was
there and could have been brought out, under favoring circumstances,
was something--in fact, it was enough; for it showed that a man is
at bottom a man, after all, even if it doesn't show on the outside.
- Barry
Disclaimer: Statements made herein are certainly not made on
behalf of NIAID.
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