"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government."
-Lenny Bruce (cited in
FUCK)
"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today."
- HG Wells
"Let's look elsewhere. Not in the shul and in the church; their time has passed--though it will come again. The human urge to celebrate, which is to say the reemergence of religion, the reemergence of the involuntary, and that which tends toward release and reaffirmation, will be seen to reassert itself in the profane, commonplace, and pagan aspects of our lives, in the scorn heaped on the Academy Awards committee that we cannot dare attribute rightfully to government; the ritual suggestion of sodomy in "take this job and shove it"; the ritual of the fire department's dog; the writer in the restaurant; the adopted southern accent of airline pilots; the exclamation of awe at the long run up the middle. These unproclaimed but operative rituals are meager, but they are close to all we have of spiritual community--they have replaced the awe of the sacrament, which itself replaced the miracle of rebirth from the dead. "
- David Mamet (From
Writing in Restaurants)