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reetings from Australia.
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I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe and the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors.
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines. Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart. |
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Neither yet let
any priest flatter himself upon the knowledge of the particular
cleanness of his own body, since their souls (over whom he hath
government) shall in the day of judgment be required at his hands as
the murderer of them, if any through his ignorance, sloth, or
fawning adulation, have perished, because the stroke of death is not
less terrible, that is given by a good man, than that which is
inflicted by an evil person ...
St Gildas, whose feast day this is;
De
Excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain), c.
540
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast ... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breath deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
Edward Abbey
Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.
Thomas Paine, Anglo-American political philosopher, born on January 29, 1737;
Common Sense, 1776; opening lines of the
'Introduction'
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an in tolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer!
Thomas Paine; ibid, 'Of the origin and design of government in
general, with concise remarks on the English Constitution'
More quotes by Thomas Paine
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Common Sense, 1776, 'Introduction'
The strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another.
Ibid
Nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice.
Ibid
Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and though avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.
Ibid, 'Of monarchy and hereditary succession'
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.
Ibid
Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that every lived.
Ibid
Youth is the seed time of good habits, as well in nations as in individuals.
Common Sense, 1776, 'Of the present ability of America, with
some miscellaneous reflexions'
As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith.
Ibid
Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.
Ibid
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women.
The Crisis, 1776, 'Introduction'
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1792
Better fare hard with good men than feast it
with bad.
The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
The world is my country, all mankind are my
brethren, and to do good is my religion.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
More Tom Paine
quotes
I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles.
Thomas Alva Edison
Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Sir Henry Morton Stanley,
Welsh-born journalist and explorer, born January
29, 1841,
on meeting Dr David
Lingstone (1813
- 1873) at
Ujiji, Central Africa, November
11, 1871
Looking from
the house, my eyes rested on the river. Ah! the hateful, murderous river,
so broad and proud and majestically calm, as though it had not bereft me
of a friend, and of many faithful souls, and as though we had never heard
it rage and whiten with fury, and mock the thunder. What a hypocritical
river! But just below the landing a steamer was ascending – the Kabinda,
John Petherbridge, master. How civilization was advancing on me! Not a
moment even to lie down and rest! Full-blooded, eager, restless, and
aggressive, it pressed on me, and claimed me for its own, without allowing
me even the time to cast one retrospective glance at the horrors left
behind.
Henry Morton Stanley;
Through
the Dark Continent, 1878
If there be one
man, more than another, who deserves to succeed in flying through the
air, that man is Mr Laurence [sic] Hargrave, of Sydney, New South
Wales. He has now constructed with his own hands no less than 18 flying
machines of increasing size, all of which fly, and as a result of his
many experiments (of which an account is about to be given) he now says,
in a private letter to the writer, that: "I know that success is dead
sure to come".
Octave Chanute,
American aviation pioneer, 1893; Lawrence Hargrave, Australian aviation pioneer,
was born on January 29, 1850
The people of Sydney who can speak of my work without a smile are very scarce; it is doubtless the same with American workers. I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers.
Lawrence Hargrave; letter to Octave Chanute, 1893
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
WC Fields, American comic actor, born on January 29, 1880
He was a friend of mine.
He was a great drunk, and if they had had marijuana in those days, I'm sure he'd
have been using it. He lived in San Fernando Valley, and he always carried a
beebee gun. And he sat in the bushes and when the tourists would go past, he
would shoot at them. One day he allowed me in his house, and he had a ladder
there, and it led up to an attic, and in this attic he had $50,000 worth of
whisky. Unopened cases of whisky. And I said to him "Bill, what have you got
that booze there for? We haven't had prohibition in twenty-five years." He said
"It may come back."
Groucho Marx on WC
Fields Source
When, for instance, the vision arose in Swedenborg's mind of a fire in Stockholm, there was a real fire raging there at the same time, without there being any demonstrable or even thinkable connection between the two. I certainly would not like to undertake to prove the archetypal connection in this case. I would only point to the fact that in Swedenborg's biography there are certain things which throw a remarkable light on his psychic state. We must assume that there was a lowering of the threshold of consciousness which gave him access to "absolute knowledge". The fire in Stockholm was, in a sense, burning in him too.
Carl Jung in Synchronicity, 1960; Emanuel Swedenborg was
born on January 29, 1688
Friend, did you bring me the silver,
Friend, did you bring me the gold,
What did you bring me my dear friend,
To keep me from the gallow's pole.
Leadbelly (Huddie William Ledbetter), American blues singer, born c. January 29, 1888
Stop rambling and stop gambling,
Quit staying out late at night.
Go home to your wife and your family,
Sit down by the fireside bright.
Leadbelly; ' Irene'
Look a here people, Listen to me
Don't try to find no home down
in Washington DC
Lord it's a bourgeois town, ooh, its a bourgeois town.
I got the Bourgeois Blues
I'm gonna spread the news all around.
Leadbelly; ' Bourgeois Blues'
Perhaps this modern age is not liable to produce such a combination of genuine folk artist and virtuoso. Because nowadays when the artist becomes a virtuoso, there is normally a much greater tendency to cease being folk. But when Leadbelly rearranged a folk melody he had come across
– he often did, for he had a wonderful ear for melody and rhythm –
he did it in line with his own great folk traditions.
Pete Seeger on Leadbelly; in The Leadbelly Songbook, 1962
My work remains a personal statement – I speak for no groups or social factions. I have no goals beyond the completion of my next story. The praise I seek from my readers is that they finish my books. After being alternately damned and praised for equally invalid reasons, I am content to trade fame for accuracy of interpretation. Fame, for a writer, is like being a dancing bear with a little hat on your head.
Gustav Hasford (d. January 29, 1993), American Vietnam veteran and author of The Short-Timers (filmed by
Stanley Kubrick as
Full Metal Jacket)
When I first encountered the dingy back room of the Royal George, I was a clever, undisciplined, pedantic show-off. My conversation was all effect – entertaining enough, I dare say – but emotional and impressionistic. In the flabby intellectual atmosphere of the Melbourne Drift, I had been encouraged to refrain from ungainly insistence upon logic and the connection of ideas, to be instead witty, joking together heterogeneous notions ... In Sydney, I found myself driven back, again and again, to basic premises, demonstrable facts. The scrupulosity that I had missed in my irreligious life was now a part of my everyday behaviour ... If ever, of anyone, I desired a good report, I desire it of them, my guides, philosophers and friends, the Sydney
Libertarians. ... I found out that in Sydney there were at least intellectually rigorous people and that they could teach me something. At least they could teach me about the way I already thought. I was already an anarchist. I just didn't know why I was an anarchist. They put me in touch with the basic texts and I found out what the internal logic was about how I felt and thought.
Germaine Greer, Australian author and
misandrist, born on January 29, 1939 Source
As far as I'm concerned, men are the product of a damaged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they're doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they're manufacturing sperm.
Germaine Greer
Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
Oprah Winfrey, American TV talk show hostess, born on January 29, 1953 or
'54 depending on the source cited
January 29 is the 29th
day of the year in the Gregorian
calendar, with 336
days remaining (337 in leap years).
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Concordia, ancient Rome
Peace festival,
birthday of the Goddesses Pax and
Irene (Our Lady of Peace)
In Roman mythology, Pax ('peace') was recognized as a goddess during the rule of Augustus Caesar.
On the Campus Martius (Field of Mars, God of War), she had a minor sanctuary called the Ara Pacis, dedicated to her on January 30, 9 BCE. Her temple was on the Templum Placis (Forum Pacis) built by Emperor Vespasian on the site of a meat market, and was dedicated in 75. She was depicted in art with olive branches, a cornucopia and a sceptre. Pax became celebrated (in both senses of the word) as Pax Romana and Pax Augusta from the 2nd Century BCE.
In Greek mythology, she was Eirene or Irene ('peace'), daughter
of Zeus and Themis, one of the first generation of Horae. The
Horae (the Hours, or Seasons), Pax and her sisters Lawfulness, Wisdom
and Order (Eunomia) and Justice (Dike), are sometimes considered to be the three
aspects of Themis. As goddesses of the seasons, they brought order to
Nature. Eirene
was the personification of peace and wealth and was depicted in art as a
beautiful young woman carrying a cornucopia,
sceptre and a torch or rhyton.
Roman festivals and notable days in the Book of Days Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days
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