A Post That Has Nothing To Do With Women

"For the last fucking time, I'm not Omar Sharif!" - Tariq Ali

"Yeah, he's the man with his finger on the pulse of Britain's cock."
- William Gladstone on Benjamin Disraeli

"I love it! A whole world run by Joe Bidens!" - Joe Biden, on the Wikileaks diplomatic cables

"I can see into the future with this moustache. When I saw what they did to Kafka I knew I couldn't go out like some punk bitch. That's why I sealed the autobiography for a century, and that's why you're buying it now when I knew the world would be ready for my message of socialism, pacifism, and mordant hate." - Mark Twain on Charlie Rose, Live from Delos

"Subjectivity qua synthesis of self-consciousness and action is the condition of freedom. In the hour of its great revolution against feudalism, the bourgeoisie was once a subject, a subject which made of men both great and small its errandboys and playthings. But Spectacular Capitalism has robbed the bourgeoisie of even this dignity by enslaving it to ideology. Thus the subject of History now is capitalism itself, and every man is its object. There can be no subjectivity--and thus no freedom--until there is no capitalism."
- Carla Bruni

Thy Name Is Woman

"But Hitch, people don't go to the movies on time!" - Janet Leigh

"There is nothing more insulting than a symbolic head of state asking her citizens to donate to charity." - Michelle Obama

"We get along because we never laugh." - Putin on Alina

"Why on earth in a documentary about prostitution would you show the prostitutes' faces but blur out the johns'? Shouldn't you do the opposite?" - Nicholas Kristof

"My Fuhrer, the War Against Sex is lost! Soon they shall have our skulls!"
"No you fool! A phantom army of eunuchs awaits my orders outside of Hamburg!"
- Hitler and his personal chef Wolfgang

British Apparel

"Brown women see right through me." - Prince Harry

"Harry only likes girls from Clemson." - Tim Tebow

"Oh balderdash of course I know how to bond with my youngest boy. Why on his 16th birthday we dressed up as Afghans and went to the finest brothels of Dubai." - Prince Charles

"Bring me the dick!" - Sarah Margaret Ferguson to Harry Wales, 1998

"If the Wedding does not bring the growth in GDP promised he will of course have to be killed." - PM David Cameron on Prince Harry

"Who the fuck is Harry?" - H.M.

"We're fucking!"

"Engaged? To a damn commoner?" - Winston Churchill in Hell

"I am gunpowder and the last of Arthur's seed on earth!" - Prince Harry before his execution in the Tower of London, Wedding Day

"Oy there gal, get me a packet of crisps and a pint of bitter, you dizzy piece." - Prince Charles to the Bride

"Are people really that stupid or am I just an asshole?" - Robert Gibbs at the Royal Wedding

"I personally requested that Her Majesty pay for a symbolic wedding for Jesus and I, but she refused." - Tony Blair

"Our marriage won't be yours and mum's! Our love is as real as my military service in Afghanistan!" - Lieutenant His Royal Highness William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor of Wales, Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter

"The wedding was gorgeous but the divorce was divine." - Kate Middleton

Let's Be Honest

"Luxury is a necessary evil." - Yasser Arafat

"Cops are the bad working class." - Ronal Serpas, PhD

"Liam Neeson is the Harrison Ford of people under 60." - Liam Neeson

"You should put more nude brown women on your blog. It would make the whole thing more transparent." - Saartjie Baartman

"Anyone to whom it occurs to talk about how cynical they themselves are is clearly not cynical enough." - Henry Luce

Gynopolis

"Look, August, this is all way more straightforward than you think."
- Gauguin to Strindberg

"The key to seduction is to give them everything they do not want and refuse them everything they do, always staying one step ahead, so that eventually you come to replace their desires with your own." - Jake Gyllenhaall

"Woman is the nigger of the world." - the racist Yoko Ono

"Natalie Portman is a Zionist myth." - Peter Beinart

"The point is not that sex is regulated but that sex is the means of regulation." - Ruth Simmons

"My god, a massive sea gull flew past the window!"
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Feargiving, Thankstaking

"Happy Thanksgiving!"
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
- John Wayne to Chief Dan George

"Only a parasite would refuse In-N-Out Burger." - Ayn Rand

"My shit is flat!" - Tom Friedman

"In honor of our savage conquest of the unyielding Rebel, this day shall be for ever known as Thanksgiving. All Americans of like Virtue shall gather on this day and the entrails and blood of Virginia shall be their succor." - Abraham Lincoln

Who's House Is That?

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/files/original/thomas%20friedman.bmp

Oh, it's right there in the URL. That is Thomas Friedman's house.

America Horribilis

"If America did not exist, it would be a dream in the mind of God."
- Laurence Olivier as Ronald Reagan in Shakespeare's Spartacus II

"Those who do not utilize their freedoms shall have them requisitioned by the People!" - Ronald Reagan

"I got mine!" - the American Worker

"If real wages kept pace with inflation and cost of living, would I even be Socialist? This is the question which haunts me at night."
- Barack Obama, 2011

Œconomy, or, The Right Disposal of Things to Their Proper Ends

"Give a child an allowance of $5 a week to teach him inadequacy, loss, and anxiety and install in him the permanent feeling that he can never make it up enough to the kind Hand that granted him the Treat." - Dave Eggers

"Keynes is the devil! All our problems are a problem of supply! The Child is full of too much blood, empty him!" - Alan Greenspan at Ayn Rand's, Midtown 1962

"I'm donating all my industrialist grandfather's coats to charity."
"Why?"
"Because I can't think of anything that would infuriate him more."
"Gee, that's funny my Pop-Pop would have loved that!"
- The Editors to Rory John Gates Jr.

"Everything changed when I realized that money derived its value from sovereign fiat instead of from worthless fetish-metals." - Rand Paul

"One thing you're right about: no one actually has a plan for creating jobs, absent an actual stimulus (e.g. WPA2).
"Or we could just go Stalinist and build like 600 lamp factories, then throw away the lamps."
"That is probably the best option."
- Jan Schakowsky (D - Illinois), Charlie Rose

"The entire point of, forget my career, my entire field is to deal with the problems that face us now. To see all that work, all that history, all those lives go to waste--the lessons of eighty years systematically ignored--precisely when they are needed most? Well that just makes me want to spend the rest of my autumn years fucking whores in Thailand." - Joseph Stiglitz to Michel Houellebecq

"History will bury you."
"Yes, but I will bury you."
- Larry Summers

"Soros can fly!"
"Take the shot!"
- Obama

"Forget about suicide bombers. What about suicide voters?"
- Sarah Palin

"The Hobbesian vision of the state of nature as a war of all against all is nothing but the self-fulfilling fantasy of a people with no experience in self-organization and no will or desire to govern themselves." - Glenn Beck

"In the war against the self there can be no survivors and no victors!" - the Public

Death Drive

"A quaint and charming rant. Big, evil, ill-defined corporations are a sexy and instrumentally useless object of ire in a society custom-built to nurture those corporations. Why is no one protesting a Congress that neutered financial reform? Why is no one protesting the reduction of capital reserve requirements for banks to below their 2007 levels? How about asking why this country just elected a party guaranteed to exacerbate income inequality, financial deregulation, and dozens of other steps that will hasten the next crisis? Populism indeed. Onward towards death..." - Glenn Beck

MAN AT THE CROSS ROADS

Long Title: Man at crossroads looking with hope and high vision to the choosing of a new and better future, 1934. Painted by Diego Rivera. Fresco.

Tweeter and the Monkey Man

"Yeah, I gave cocaine to that stripper." - Federal District Judge Jack T. Camp on being convicted of federal drug charges. Northern District of Georgia, Nov 20, 2010.

"Aw the only way to handle a bunch of rowdy kids is to get a big ol towel or piece of rope and get it real wet yeah, and just start on floggin the bastards out of your space." -Bruce Springsteen, Asbury Park 1971

Let's all drink to the tears of a clown
The lions they won't bite and the tigers won't roar
Let's all drink to the death of a clown
I shot Abe Lincoln and I didn't spend my stimulus check!

"Yeah biddy go wet up some of that length o' rope!" - Bruce Springsteen, Jersey Shore 2008

Lap It Up

"I think that given your politics, sex is something that, if you made the effort, you might like." - Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron, 1984

"Stab her on this tablet and all your gardens will be forever green." - Jimmy Carter to Howard Dean, 2003

"Well get on up here, smear mud on your ass and bail some goddamn hay!"- Ronald Reagan to his son Ron.

"I'm my own Dad!" - Speaker John Boehner

I Love Your Work

"What do you do?"
"I write about things that never happened."
"Why do you do that?"
"Because I am a coward."
- the Writer

"What do you do?"
"I pretend to be some one I'm not."
"Why do you do that?"
"Because I am a child."
- the Actor

"With writers you can talk about anything and the entire time they are secretly evaluating your "intelligence"--whether what you think about things is aesthetically congruent with what they think about things. It's a much more total form of surveillance than with painters. You meet a painter and the first thing they say is 'What's your work like?' That's all they care about. Every social event is a crit. It's the realization of modern conservatory painting. You dispose with the object entirely. You just produce discourse, and then they produce discourse about your discourse, all in order to regulate your sexual relationships. That's why I like Tahitian women: they never ask me about my work."
- Paul Gauguin

"You have no idea what this place means to me."
"Nor do I want to. Nor do I care."
- the farmer, the IDF

The Devil's Bartlett's

"Blood in the urine! I am ready!" - The Editors

"I am certain that the void out of which these quotes emanate and the darkness in which Charlie Rose is suspended are one." - The Editors

"According to Sharia, you can only have four quotes per post." - Daisy Khan

"Has not Evil a History? Shall it not be chronicled in poetry and song? And shall not laurels be placed on the heads of its proclaimers for as long as they keep them?" - Robespierre

Star Time

"James Brown is the real self-made man. He'd kill Horatio Alger's whole family." - Rev. Al Sharpton

"The real question is whether Brown saved the wrong city that night." - Cornell West

"My politics? "If I Ruled the World" as sung by James Brown, Dallas '68." - Walter Mondale

"If James Brown did not exist, he would be a dream in the mind of James Brown." - James Brown

Democracia tropical

A belated squeal out to former guerrilla-turned-technocrat Dilma Rousseff, president-elect of Brazil, whose 10% victory margin at the polls is all the more stunning for her utter lack of even charisma. The administration of this latest South American Matriarch, who is allegedly further to the Left than Four Finger's Lu on key policy issues, may reveal if there is any real egalitarian bite to the populist bark of the Brazilian Novo contro. W'ell be keeping a close watch.

"Nine out of ten movie stars make me cry, I'm alive!" - Lula

"Getting out the vote is like telling a dog to roll over." - Koni the Dog

Carnival of Hate

"As governor I will burn every last check cashing store to the ground and make of their ashes a monument to the People. I will ban the lottery and create state auction houses for art and wine, replacing everywhere revenue from dumb shit that poor people do with that from dumb shit that rich people do." - Andrew Cuomo

"When the squirrel loses its old stored nuts it eats its brothers." - President Dr. Karolos Papoulias

"I have never been young, beautiful, or happy, and I have alienated everyone who ever loved me. I regret nothing." - Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"Nothing I hate more than conspicuous consumption by upwardly mobile Blacks." - Smoky Robinson

"Why, anything for a fellow gentleman of Harvard." - Ray Kelly to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"Yeah he did the coke and he heard the synths and he knew what a man had to do!" - Mike Bloomberg on Robert Palmer's Clues

"Wake not the sleeping dragon, for to slay him you must love his wife!" - Kathleen Hays

"We didn't really do all that much. We did play 'Drift Away' a few times and sang along, 'Yellow Brick Road,' all the classics." - George H.W. Bush on his last weekend with Oliver North

El Placer de Voler

"It's hard for me to accept that its over, and harder still to accept that its not." - Qadaffi on the Lockerbie bombing

"I'm Amtraking it. No way I'll condescend to this Epcot Center Rape Pagoda bullshit. You want some goddam Jamaican to jerk your chicken every time you fly out of JFK?!"
"I'm not worried, my dick looks like a tea party."
- Joe Biden and Colin Powell

"Touch me!" - Dan Quayle

"They tell me national security can never be guaranteed by security measures, only by political ones. I know these are supposed to be words of reason, but the thought just makes my dick harder." - Janet Napolitano

Love's a Bitch, Part 2

"Tigers chasing down peasants! Burning fields of wheat! Gleaming pyramids of polished skulls! Alina!!!!" - Putin at Primal Scream Therapy, Seoul 2010

"When I die here she will be tied to the great rocket which sends me to celestial battle on the planet Saturn." - Putin on Alina

"Why don't you shut up and touch these elbows?" - Jenny Sanford to Brian Williams, NBC News 2011

"Stoned blind and out of his mind is what he has to be!" - Garth Brooks comforting Tipper Gore

"Why?!"
"Because you don't hate me like she hates me!"
- Vanessa Hudgens, Zack Efron

"When I'm beating her I'm thinking of you."
- Frank Sinatra to Jerry Lewis

"I have rejected love because I want to make myself invulnerable. The only weakness I have left is my mounting loneliness. It's only a matter of time until the wrong woman comes along, and I am undone by my own hand. One way or another, love destroys us all." - Ken Starr

"People will say that my work is too autobiographical. 'No one cares about your breakup,' they'll say. I prefer not to think of what I do as self-expression. Instead, I see it as evidence of material determinism: our gross animal bodies hold sway even over the kingdom of the mind." - Katy Perry

"Ms. Warren will you accept my invitation or do you do me a dishonor?" - Sen. Jeff Sessions R-AL to Elizabeth Warren

"The nuclear family is the strip mall of social institutions. You can get anything there, except the real thing." - Henry Fonda

Love's a Bitch

"It’s about a man and his wife who no longer speak the same language. The dog they take on walks then intervenes and speaks. How I’ll do it, I don’t yet know. The rest is simple." - Godard on his next last film, Adieu au langage

"If the Russian people had half the heart of Koni, I'd beat them like Koni." - Putin on his dog, Koni.

"I had a horrible nightmare where my mother was the witch from Suspiria the other night." - George W. Bush

"Everything I ever learned about love and women I learned in my father's bar. Not that women were allowed in the bar, but the shape of the room was distinctly similar to a certain feature of the female anatomy." - John Boehner

"How can you not get laid? Your standards are too high, or you drink liquor that's too good." - Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olberman

"OK Cupid is GHB for your sense of dignity." - Robert Scoble

"What an ugly, meaningless farce." - Jim Carey's marriage

"I'd rather be burning trash in my yard." - Ben Bernanke, Thanksgiving dinner

Stalin or Stalin

"Socialism is pearls before swine." - Adam Smith

"Redistribution of wealth is but flushing the economic toilet." - Bill Gates

"NYC Schools to Be Run By Another Media Executive" - NY Times

"Kanye West > Matthew Barney." - Jeff Koons

"Film is propaganda." - Bob Hope

"What an asshole." - Oprah on Conan

"Look, learn what you're going to learn from this and turn the lesson into an abstraction so that you don't have to remember the experience." - Al Cowlings

"The Enlightenment: From Spinoza to Robespierre, 117 Years that Broke the Back of Intellectual History" - a new book by Ryan Ruby

"Do you describe yourself as a nihilist?"
"Insofar as I bother to describe myself."
- John Boehner on Charlie Rose

Fall of the Chrystal Palace

You're Lying says "Good show!" to the British student protesters at Tory headquarters in Milibank for their admirable restraint against feckless riot police and spectacular violence against Property. Below evidences the most inspiring moment of spontaneous, strategic morality which the day's festivities produced.



"These nervous pranks are not without danger, and one often has to pay for them dearly. But what matters an eternity of damnation to one who has found an infinity of joy in a single second?" - Tony Benn

"Servile masses, we are about to be inconvenienced salute you!" - David Cameron

It's All About Me

"What advice did you give to your successor?"
"Pee sitting down whenever you can."
- Barbara Walters interviewing Vladimir Putin

"I'm even better than Harvard assholes because I don't like that I'm a Harvard asshole." - Zadie Smith

"Zadie Smith had the most worthless Social Network/Zuckerberg review in the NYRB.  I didn't even finish it, probably because I'm a racist misogynist." - The Editors

"Twas not me, good sirs. Muddy Waters invented electricity." - Ben Franklin

"I will be alone forever. I will be free forever." - David Geffen
in his Hall of Jade

"With anyone else it just feels forced, and I'm too self-conscious to enjoy myself. Only oppressing the Chinese gives me pleasure." - Wen Jiabao

"I want to return to my great theme again, you know? The Death of the West."
"Somebody get this guy the fuck out of here."
-Robert Towne and Warren Beatty's last meeting, 1991

"Those quotes are so great, you really deserve to become famous for them in some limited way." - the Devil

"I didn't ask to be born." - Jeb Bush

The Consolations of Philosophy

"Like all cowards, my one true dream is to wield legitimized violence from afar." - The Editors

"President Bush said the only way to be strong is to drink the blood of children orphaned by war." -Nestor Kirchner

"If people are dogs, then I am Michael Vick." - Mike Huckabee

"The true calling of any great race is to exterminate itself." - Barack Obama

"No God but God, no violence but sexual violence." - Silvio Berlusconi

Q: Why do school shootings happen?
A: Why shouldn't they?

"The problem with Hamas, for example, is not that their anti-Semites. It's that they are Utopians." - Abdulllah II of Jordan

"No, I'm probably incorrect. I would still have become president if I hadn't quit drinking, but I might have prevented 9/11." - George W. Bush to Matt Lauer

"Can anything that gives the game away, makes explicit the terms and conditions of life—be a consolation?  Rather, one suspects it is the opposite, the one form of life, after which, all consolation becomes impossible.  Work, Art, Religion, Family, Health, Politics: these are all consolations in the proper sense of the word.  Led by its bourgeois vanguard, which has liberated, on principle, millions from the limitations of survival, humanity attempts to console itself in and for its decades of free time, its decades of boredom, its decades-long queuing up for execution.  Philosophy is a consolation only insofar as it forgets that the problems with which it deals—those of Work, Art, Religion, Family, Health, Politics—are problems of its own invention, the solution to all of which, at this late date in history, is possible, easy, even self-evident: the atom bomb." - Alain de Botton

Turn of the Screw

"The sentences of Henry James are rocks shoved down the throats of his intelligent readers to make liver pâté for his unintelligent ones."
- William James

"The novels of Henry James are like fine Parisian hotels requisitioned by the gestapo for the torture not of resistance fighters but of the English language." - Vladimir Nabokov

"Henry James is the greatest American writer for whom English was a foreign language." - Joseph Conrad

"Nabokov faults every other writer in history for not being himself, which, while true, is not useful." - Peter Sellers

"The care he took of his body was reasonable; there was no solicitous anxiety to prolong its existence, or to embellish its appearance."
- Harry Reid on John Boehner

"Is a point round?" - Mikhail Khodorkovsky

"I am no longer the man I fell in love with." - Tony Hayward

"Don't Ask Don't Tell should never be repealed. Combat purifies homosexual touch by replacing erotic desire with the death drive.  Remove the repression and you lose the beauty both of battle and gay love."  - Anderson Cooper

"I will film myself thinking about myself in perpetuity on the basis of permanent financial security." - Werner Herzog, NEA grant application

"Kill me!" - Bugs Bunny

Happy Are the Haters

“What is the key? How to avoid the all too familiar degeneration of universal contempt into loathing of the particular, the slide from noble misanthropy into anti-Semitism and misogyny? Whence this corruption? From desperation, contentment or mere senility? If you examine this drama, rehearsed again and again by so many once-great minds, you will see that the fateful turn comes when one becomes enthralled to a vision of a world unified, happy, and free if only a certain contagion were controlled or eliminated. The problem is not hopelessness but hopefulness, the ruse of utopia tainting a pure and proper nihilism. All people are dogs, and always will be. Denial of this fact is the road to bigotry. If you are tempted by the consolation of prejudice, it is because you are not yet Hopeless enough.” – President Jimmy Carter

"I only put makeup on my ass." - George Clooney

"Jimmy McMillan's paranoid and insular views on class are the only hope for the lowdown and browbeaten in this City. That is why I'm putting him on my private plane to San Francisco tomorrow morning." - Mayor Michael Bloomberg

"I'll never have to bathe myself again!" - Speaker of the House John Boehner

“One upon a time there was a dying king who mourned for his people, not because he feared what would become of them without his guiding wisdom, but because they honestly believed that he possessed such wisdom. He had been a usurper-king, an exiled patriot who led his people in just revolt against a waning, decadent regime. Providence had seen it fit to give him a portion of the gods’ immortality, and for one hundred fifty years he reigned. Three generations of his people passed from infancy to manhood before his eyes. He took from those who had too much and gave to those who had too little. He burned religion from the land. In the cities he established his iron rule, expelled foreign occupiers, and built gleaming metropolises of glass and steel. The countryside he lifted out of illiteracy, but made care not to tamper unduly with the dignified poverty of the peasants. In the autumn of his life he abolished his own office and arranged a peaceful transfer of power to successors whom the people had approved by plebiscite. He ruled now as a figurehead only. But anxiety gathered like deathbed sweat on his brow. His people had known neither want nor war for nearly half a century. Society swelled with scholars, clerks and entertainers instead of artisans, warriors, and molders of earth. The civic rituals he had established, convenient fictions, had slowly ossified into orthodoxies resembling the old superstitions. Without his image to take upon itself all the sins of nation-building and without his smile to absolve them, would his people be capable of the crimes which History demanded of them? His last breathe was a sigh of relief. He knew that they would.” – Mao Zedong, 2104

I Wish Paul Were Dead

"How much better would Sgt. Pepper be if they'd junked the stupid concept, renamed the album, and removed the crappy 'framing device' tracks, but left it otherwise untouched?

Without that stupid 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)', the animal sounds of 'Good Morning Good Morning' would fade directly into the acoustic strumming of 'A Day In the Life'. What a transition! What total art! Day into Night, reality into dream, Ulysses into Finnegans Wake!

Really, the whole 'Lonely Hearts Club Band' thing belongs in the section of the Wikipedia article where they talk about all the crazy album ideas Paul tossed around after Revolver that the other members swiftly rejected." - guest contributor Ringo Starr

Nuance Is Ideology

"No one wants to read your post-colonial vanity blog."
- Nicholas Kristof

"I am literally saying nothing." - Andrew Sullivan

"The problem with Munich is that it portrays Palestinian terrorism farce and Mossad vengeance as tragedy, when the truth is so clearly opposite." - Steven Spielberg

"Strategically, the left-wing needs the Anarchist as canon fodder, in the same way that for Lincoln the Clone War would have been a failure without the Slave." - George Lucas

"When I was sent to negotiate with Chavez after the sack of D.C., he demanded the city's weight in silicone and gold. I asked what then, what would be left for the people of Washington? Like an arrogant barbarian he laughed and said 'Their lives!'" - David Broder, 2015

"Yes they do love me don't they? Actually before the rally I passed a starving woman and her child on the street. They asked me why I couldn't save them. Hey, I'm just a comedian!" - Jon Stewart to Haley Barbour at the Meat Club

"Love is as much a prejudice as Hate. Now more than ever we need alienation. All our empathy, all our affection, all our so-called humanity and every petty fondness and sentiment it entails we must abandon as pitilessly as we once did our bigotry. Morality is a matter of arithmetic, nothing more. It is a matter of those who have and those who have not." - Stephen Colbert

"Mad Men 2067: a seductive period drama about the shocking truth of the 'good old days' of the last great newspapers, centering around an intrepid jounalist who shills ad copy masquerading as arts criticism. Sunday nights on Al-Jazeera, brought to you by Google." - Robot Roger Ebert

"The Lizard Woman said that if I was pliant, I could lie with her forever in the grotto." - Bill Clinton