- Firefly, Title Theme
*****
"Today's pig is tomorrow's bacon."
- Greg Palast
*****
Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.
- Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain
From "Songs of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
*****
A scorpion stood at the bank of a river, wanting to cross it. A duck swam by, and the scorpion asked the duck to carry him across on his back. The duck refused, saying "If I let you on my back, you will sting me and I will die." The scorpion said "No, I promise I will not sting you, for if I do I will then drown in the river." So the duck agreed. The scorpion climbed onto the duck's back, and as the duck swam across the middle of the river the scorpion stung the duck. "Why did you do that?" cried the duck. "Now we will both die." To which the scorpion replied, "I'm a scorpion. That's what I do."
-Middle Eastern Proverb
*****
"...for no one- no one in this world can you trust- not men, not women, not beasts- this you can trust."
- Conan's father, Conan the Barbarian
Click Here for a Critical Appreciation of Conan the Barbarian
*****
"Once someone asked me why I became a swordmaker. I told them that I had tried not being a swordmaker for thirty years and it just wasn't working out for me."
- Michael Tinker Pearce
*****
"The woman I love says there is no one she would rather wed than me, not though Jupiter himself should apply. So she says; but what a woman says to an eager lover should be written on the wind and running water."
- Catullus
*****
"Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior."
- ibid.
*****
"Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus amore. Nox tibi longa venit, nec reditura dies."
- Propertius
*****
"I have walked my way since the beginning of time; sometimes I give, sometimes I take. It is mine to know which and when!"
- Merlin, Excalibur
*****
"He who controls the copywrites controls the Duniverse!"
*****
"A girl without freckles is like a night without stars."
- Some guy on redheadgallery.com
*****
"After a time you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
- Spock, "Amok Time"
*****
"Listen, strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government...."
- Dennis, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
*****
"Yes, I am nouveau riche, but then it's the riche that counts, now isn't it? There's only two things that interest me: work, and those trappings of aristocracy that I find worthwhile. The very things they're forced to sell when the money runs out. And it always runs out. And then all they're left with is their lovely manners."
- Jim Williams, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
*****
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
- Robert E. Howard
*****
"Dying is bad enough -- but losing my sense of humor? Forget it."
- Commander William T. Riker
*****
"People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- Agent K, Men in Black
*****
"But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days."
- "Richard III," I,i.
*****
"The better part of valour is discretion..."
- "Henry IV, Part One," V,iv.
*****
"For my part, I care not: I say little; but when time shall serve, there shall be smiles; but that shall be as it may."
- "Henry V," II,i.
*****
"I beseech you, punish me not with your hard thoughts; wherein I confess me much guilty, to deny so fair and excellent ladies any thing. But let your fair eyes and gentle wishes go with me to my trial: wherein if I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never gracious; if killed, but one dead that was willing to be so: I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me, the world no injury, for in it I have nothing; only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty."
- "As You Like It," I,ii.
*****
"I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation, nor the musician's, which is fantastical, nor the courtier's, which is proud, nor the soldier's, which is ambitious, nor the lawyer's, which is politic, nor the lady's, which is nice, nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry's contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness."
- ibid., IV,i.
*****
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini
*****
"Life is like a box of chocolates--a cheap, thoughtless perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for; unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down and there's nothing left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or English toffee, but they're gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're desperate enough to eat those all you've got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers."
-Cancer Man, "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man," The X-Files
*****
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
- T.E. Lawrence
*****
"With two thousand years of experience behind us we have no excuse, when fighting, for not fighting well."
- ibid.
*****
"The liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."
- FDR
*****
"I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it's that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson."
- The God Emperor Leto II
*****
"Dehydrate the Zabulon computations!"
- Muad'Dib
*****
"Revenge is a dish best served family-style."
- Sideshow Bob
*****
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
*****
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders."
- Law and Governance, The Spacing Guild Manual
*****
"General Feraud has made occasional attempts to kill me. That does not give him the right to claim my acquaintance."
- D'Hubert, The Duellists
*****
"Of course he has a knife! He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians. How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we're the origins of war. Not history's forces nor the times nor justice nor the lack of it nor causes nor religions nor ideas nor kinds of government nor any other thing! We are the killers; we breed war. We carry it, like syphilis, inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten."
- Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Lion in Winter
*****
In a moment
I am swept
To a place
That only exists in dreams.
It is in this brief moment
That I taste true happiness,
This moment is found
In your arms.
-Anne Frances Cook
