Thursday

A Random Passage

"Jack [Kerouac] 'believed in a conservative working-class America' and in 'baseball, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, and apple pie,' according to his friend, the Beat publisher John Montgomery. Naturally, he supported constitutional Republican Robert Taft for president in 1952." Bill Kauffman

"[T]he Harvey Wallbanger [was] named after some reeling idiot in California." Kingsley Amis.

"And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long–he has existed long." Seneca

"Sigmund Freud–whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths . . .". Joseph Epstein

"To study, to work: these are inescapable duties for all Christians." Escriva

"[W]hen John Lennon lectured the world on peace and brotherhood even though in his own life he went years without seeing his son from his first marriage, he was only one in a long series of universalist humanitarians dating back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century political thinker who was all broken up at the news of the suffering caused by the earthquake in Lisbon, but who placed all five of his own children in a foundling asylum, thereby condemning them to lives of hard labor and misery." Tom Woods