Month: February 2013

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), British statesman, author. letter, Nov. 4, 1868, to Queen Victoria.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

This was written by Benjamin Franklin, within quotation marks but is generally accepted as his original thought, sometime shortly before February 17, 1775 as part of his notes for a proposition at the Pennsylvania Assembly, as published in Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin (1818)

I posted this because of the court case Aaron Tobey vs. Terri Jones, Rebecca Jones, Quentin Trice, Calvin Vann, Department of Homeland Security & Richmond International Airport Police.

The Judges did the write thing in deciding that this was a violation of his 1st amendment rights.

For his troubles he is award $250,000. Thank you  Judge Roger Gregory & Judge James Wilkinson III.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

George Eliot
George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans] (1819–1880), British novelist, editor. Middlemarch, bk. 2, ch. 15 (1871).

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself “superior.”

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), British novelist. A Room of One’s Own, ch. 5 (1929).