Dancing with Words …
Just when you you’ve found a neat way to say it, you pick up a book, or an e-mail comes and you find another has said it better, shorter, and more lucid.
You live in hope one day you’ll match them. Anyway here’s some recent favourites. Some recently published, others as old as time, which brought forth Thoreau’s thought: “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.”
A few on TV …
Checking our current TV channel choices I heartily agree with Woody Allen, only it’s not just California. “In California,” he said, “they don’t throw their garbage away — they make it into TV shows.” Anonymous added, “TV allows you to be entertained in your living room by characters you ordinarily wouldn’t allow in your house.” followed with “I find television educational. Every time it’s switched on I go to another room and read a good book.” Marya Mames philosophized adding, “ The more people reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.”
It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.
Four of the millions of expressions printable about politics …
A Grit magazine editor wrote: “Liberty has never come from government. The history of liberty is the history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.” Decades ago Robert Louis Stevenson observed, “Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”
“Never underestimate the pettiness of those in power,” came from Pie in the Sky, an English TV series. Leigh Hunt’s prophetic words came before our last federal bunch hit the bricks. “The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.”
Tread where the traffic does not go.
Callimanchus (c.310-246B.C.)
On government as a whole …
Here’s a short Accountability Act from Hubert Humphrey: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly, and those who are in the shadows of life — the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
George Gilder’s words are especially timely as Revenue Canada’s end of April approaches. “High tax rates,” George wrote, “do nothing to stop people from being rich; the rich can always manipulate funds and properties in ways to avoid taxation. British aristocrats and Swedish tycoons have demonstrated that for decades.
“High tax rates, however, are effective in preventing poor and middle class people from getting rich through working harder and more resourcefully than the classes above them. Thus these high tax rates impoverish entire societies.”
I dislike monkeys. They always remind me of poor relations.
H. Luttrell.
On bulletin boards, fridges and the like …
“You ain’t learnin’ nothin’ when you’re talking,” was neatly penned above the coffee machine, and in a booth in McTooles Restaurant, Crossfield , AB.
“I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to just eat vegetables,” Shirley’s fridge tells us. “Snowmen fall from heaven unassembled.” (Yeah, man, even at Easter!) And finally “THe CelEbRity PoLitIcO LaW — No matter how foolish the cause, there will be a famous actor or actress acting as spokesperson for it.”
Cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.
M. Twain.
Oh well, it’s OK … “I live in my own little world, but it’s OK — they know me here.” A tip of the hat to those skilled at Dancing with Words, particularly they who take a few, string them together equaling the beauty of a diamond necklace.
On second thought, a necklace of well-chosen words surpasses, any necklace, ever … lasts longer too.
Oh, dig this one, it came to hand just as I put 30 on this column: It’s from the fourth US president, James Madison: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
A final tidbit — The town of St. Paul, Alberta, has a 11.79-metre diameter flying Saucer Landing Pad to welcome unidentified flying objects. That’s hospitality says my Farmers Almanac. PS: So, what’s the speed of dark?
