Life of Bryan: Random Thoughts

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

With their tanks, and their bombs, and their bombs, and their guns In your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie What's in your head? In your head?

There is more power in telling little than in telling all.

Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights ... Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law ... Give us the ballot and we will fill our legislative halls with men of good will ... Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy ... Give us the ballot and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's decision of May 17, 1954.

Joy, gentle friends! Joy and fresh days of love accompany your hearts!

You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig?

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd.

And meet the time as it seeks us.

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.

I'll befall the yellow flowers, Children of the flaring hours! Buttercups, that will be seen, Whether we will see or no; Others, too, of lofty mien; They have done as worldlings do, Taken praise that should be thine, Little, humble, Celandine !

We built an economy with no shock absorbers...We made a system that looked like it was maximizing profits but had higher risks and lower resiliency.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear... I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.

When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.