MONEY IS NOT WEALTH

"That's certainly possible, and possibly certain."
--A. Richard Miller

"The simple proof is left to the simple student."
--A. Richard Miller>

"And Mussolini made the trains run on time."
--(see Snopes)

"What FOOLES these mortals be!"
--William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

"What hath G.O.D.* wrought?"  (*- General Overall Design)
--A. Richard Miller

"If the Earth was flat, cats would have pushed everything off it by now."     
--Anon.

"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron."
--Spider Robinson

"There are two types of people in the world:
1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data."
--Anon.

"If I say I will fix it, there's no need to remind me every six months."
--Anon.

"The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers."
--Anon.

"I don't know HOW to act my age. I've never BEEN this old before."
--Anon.

"Two kinds of NERDS:
May the Force be
- equal to mass times acceleration.
- with you."
--Anon.

"Understanding Engineers:
Percussive Maintenance: I hit it and it started working.
Thermal Shock: It burned.
Cycle Power To The Panel: Turn it off and on again.
Organic Grounding: I got electrocuted.
High-Impedance Air Gap: I forgot to plug it in.
Kinetic Disassembly: It blew up.
Thermally Reconfigured: It melted."
--Anon.

"If you don't like the New England weather, just wait a minute."
--Mark Twain??
<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/02/22/weather-wait/>

"It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop."
--Confucius

"Smart people learn from everything and everyone.
Average people learn from their experiences.
Stupid people already have all the answers."
--Socrates?

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection."
--Mark Twain

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
--Honore de Balzac

"Money Is Not Wealth."
--Alan Watts

'Wise are those who learn that the Bottom Line doesn't always have to be their top priority."
--William Arthur Ward

"We let a genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear
weapons.
 AI is somewhat similar - it's part-way out of the bottle.
Scamming is going to be the growth industry of all time!"
--Warren Buffett Compares AI To Nuclear Weapons In Stark Warning. (CNN, May 6, 2024)

"The saddest aspect of life today, is that science gathers
knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
--Isaac Asimov

"Seek wisdom, not knowledge.
Knowledge is of the past;
wisdom is of the future."
--Native-American proverb

"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high, and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and hitting the mark."
--Michelangelo

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
--Paul Joseph Goebbels, Germany's Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 1933-1945 (pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic propaganda)
"Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will."
--Paul Joseph Goebbels, Germany's Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 1933-1945 (pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic propaganda)

"The elites rely on our complicity, our labor, and our silence to maintain their dominion. Our collective power lies in our ability to say no. By refusing to participate in their wars, by resisting their propaganda, we can dismantle their power.
Imagine we chose to serve each other instead! Picture the strength of a unified populace, rejecting the exploitation and brutality inflicted in our name. It is our duty to reclaim the values they have perverted, the future they threaten, and the planet they are setting aflame with their endless pursuit of profit. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to disrupt this cycle of violence and build a new social order that values human dignity over capital."
--Peter S. Baron: Groveling At The Feet Of Greed: How U.S. Politicians Sacrifice Lives For Profit And Power. (Hampton Institute, August 6, 2024)

"The Country's In The Very Best Of Hands!" , from "Li'l Abner", (1956 on Broadway, and as a movie in 1959.

"When Will They Ever Learn?"
--Peter, Paul and Mary in 1965.
[Oh, they've learned. When will WE (at least a majority of us) ever learn - and VOTE accordingly?]

NEW: "There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
--Commander William Adama, in Battlestar Galactica
--S01E03 "Water", written by Ron Moore

"Putting a clown in a palace doesn't make him a
sultan, but it can turn the palace into a circus."
--Turkish Proverb

"Never under-estimate a man who over-estimates himself."
--U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see."
--Henry David Thoreau

"If you think tough men are dangerous, wait
until you see what weak men are capable of."
--Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, "12 Rules For Life - An Antidote To Chaos" - (2018; quote is at end of Rule 11 - page 302 of 360.)

"It was not called The Net Of A Million Lies for nothing."
--Vernor Vinge, re the Internet ("A Fire Upon The Deep", 1992)

"Con men look for human frailty to exploit. This is most
often greed. Trump found a different vice: anger. The
emotional are always the most susceptible to manipulation."
--Pamela Meyer
[I'd say Trump lies to exploit a triumvirate: greed, anger and stupidity.]

"Common sense is like deodorant; those who need it the most, never use it."
--unknown (Jill heard it on the radio.)

"Take a look at some of the this country's most popular programs: Medicare, Social Security, public schools, libraries. None of those are Capitalist inventions. None of these are corporate-backed, and none of these are initiated by tax-based incentives."
--Martin Luther King?   

And what do we call $700-Billion in the Wall Street bailouts of 2008?
"All too often, we have Socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor."
--Martin Luther King

...When the public democratically decides to invest in ourselves, the working people, they call it Socialism.
But when a billionaire-captured government forces the public to pay for their misdeeds at the expense of working people, they just call it the 'Cost of Capitalism'."
--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

"Under Capitalism, man exploits man.
Under Communism, it's just the opposite."
--John Kenneth Galbraith

"It doesn't matter what a political ad actually says.
It's about what it conveys when you turn off the sound."
--Karl Rove

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
What I mean by that, is an opportunity to do
things that you think you could not do before."
--Rahm Emanuel (Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, Nov. 7, 2008)

"Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis."
--Niccolo Machiavelli (15th-Cent. Florentine writer and statesman)

"Speaking Truth is an obligation, which ultimately
brings persons of integrity into confrontation with
power structures and vested interests."
--Thomas Merton

"To quote the brilliant Grimes, 'Being a founder doesn't
mean killing what you hate, it means saving what you love.'"
--Bari Weiss (immediately before Call-to-action "10. ", in The New Founders America Needs, The Free Press, July 10, 2022)
[The speech by Bari Weiss is well-worth reading - and debating. Grimes is the stage-name of popular Canadian singer, musician and song-writer Claire Elise Boucher (who also had three children with Elon Musk, but that's another story). This Grimes quote is from her song, ?? in the album ?? (2020?). If you know, please tell us!]

"If our leaders spent a lot more time investing in the
next generation and a lot less time telling them what's
good for them, we would all be a lot better off."
--Lucas Kunce

"Scientific Conclusion: Let's elect politicians NOW
who understand, and will ACT on, scientific conclusions
- NOT on cost-effective bribes from the worst polluters."
--Dick Miller

"Nobody should be surprised that a president
who's broken nearly all My commandments
doesn't want to uphold the Constitution."
--God <https://mas.to/@godpod@universeodon.com>

"The only good evidence against evolution is the existence of Trump."
[One sign at the Stand Up for Science rally in Washington D.C. on March 7, 2025.]

"Yes, as through this world I've wandered,
   I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
   And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
   Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
   Drive a family from their home."
--Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads (53-min. audio)
[And pasted on his guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists!"]

"Some rob with a six-shooter,
    And some with a computer."
--Dick Miller

"What is the robbing of a bank,
compared to the founding of a bank?"
--Bertolt Brecht

"Yes, we're corrupt."
--A List Of Politicians Admitting That Money Controls Politics

"When these fall, Fascism thrives:
- Universities
- Science
- Freedom of the Press
- Judiciary"
--On a sign at a Hands-Off Protest (USA, April 19, 2025)

"Never confuse education with intelligence."
--Richard P. Feynman

"Too many of us now tend to worship
self-indulgence and consumption.
Human identity is no longer defined
by what one does, but by what one owns.
But we've discovered that owning things
 and consuming things does not satisfy
our longing for meaning."
--Jimmy Carter (1979, as U.S. President)

"We have a problem with Stuff: we have too much of it,
too much of it is toxic, and we don't share it very well.
But that's not the way things have to be."
--Introduction to "The Story of Stuff" (Annie Leonard, founder, 2007)

"An idea can accommodate itself to a single molecule of
the brain or expand to the circumference of the Horizon."
--"The Descent Of Man" (a story by Edith Wharton, 1904)

"For the last two-hundred years or so, we have very slowly
been committing collective suicide. We have been doing it
by changing the chemical composition of the planet's biosphere, the part of the planet that makes it the Earth - as the place for life to be. The chemicals we are releasing, both man-made and natural, are poisoning, sickening and mutating living things and making a hospitable and generally benign biosphere turn inhospitable, hostile and unsupportive of life."
--Introduction to "The Descent Of Man" (??, 2010)

"Cycling Is Bad For The Economy.
A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy:
- He does not buy a car and does not take out a car loan.
- He does not buy car insurance.
- He does not buy fuel.
- He does not send his car for servicing & repairs.
- He does not use paid parking.
- He does not become obese.
Healthy people are not needed for the economy:
- They do not buy drugs.
- They do not go to hospitals and doctors.
- They add nothing to the country's GDP.
On the contrary, every new McDonald's creates at least 30
jobs - 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 weight-loss experts
– apart from people working in McDonald's.
Choose wisely: A bike ride, or a Big Mac with cheese?
Think about it!
P.S. – Walkers are even worse. They do not even buy a bicycle."
--NOT Sanjay Thakrar, CEO at Euro Exim Bank Ltd. (2018)

"It is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of the working-class -
especially if he is handicapped by the possession of ideals and illusions."
--What Life Means To Me, by Jack London (1905)

"Peace was not in the interest of a stable society; even if lasting peace 'could be achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of society to achieve it'.
  War was a part of the economy. Therefore, it was necessary to conceive a state of war for a stable economy. The government, the group theorized, would not exist without war, and nation-states existed in order to wage war. War served the vital function of diverting collective aggression. They recommended 'credible substitutes' and paying a 'blood price' to emulate the economic functions of war. Prospective government-devised alternatives to war included:
- reports of alien life-forms,
- the reintroduction of a 'euphemized form' of slavery 'consistent with modern technology and political processes', and
- one deemed particularly promising in gaining the attention of the malleable masses, the threat of 'gross pollution of the environment'."
--Wikipedia's summary of "REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN
ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE" (Leonard C. Lewin and others, 1967)
[You can read the entire book, above. Here's another
sample, from its Section 5, "The Functions Of War":
"As we have indicated, the preeminence of the concept
of war as the principal organizing force in most societies
has been insufficiently appreciated.
This is also true of its extensive effects throughout the
many nonmilitary activities of society. These effects are
less apparent in complex industrial societies like our own
than in primitive cultures, the activities of which can be more
 easily and fully comprehended.
"We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary,
implied, and usually invisible functions of war, to the extent
they they bear on the problems of transition to peace
for our society. The military, or ostensible, function of
the war system requires no elaboration; it serves simply
to defend or advance the "national interest" by means
of organized violence.
It is often necessary for a national military establishment to create a need for its unique powers - to maintain the franchise, so to speak. And a healthy military apparatus requires regular "exercise", by whatever rationale seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy.
"The nonmilitary functions of the war system are more basic.
They exist not merely to justify themselves but to serve
broader social purposes. If and when war is eliminated,
the military functions it has served will end with it. But its
nonmilitary functions will not. It is essential, therefore, that
we understand their significance before we can reasonably
expect to evaluate whatever institutions may be proposed to replace them."
--Anti-war satire, yes. And, a blueprint for where we're headed.]

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the
clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
--U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower (April 16, 1953)

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.
This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
--U.S. President John Adams, letter to Jonathan Jackson (October 2, 1780); The Works of John Adams, vol. 9, p. 511.

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned and an era
of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.
I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
--U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (1864 letter to William Fletcher Elkin), or faked in Caldwell Remedy Company pamphlet (May 10, 1888), or...
< http://abrahamlincolnassociation.org/Newsletters/1-1.pdf> (pp. 4-6)
< https://americanmissive.com/2009/03/20/did-abraham-lincoln-say-that>

"Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about.
And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do."
--Bill Maher

"We have a Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities."
--Bill Maher

"What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth.
For the land is our mother, nourishing all her children,
beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams,
everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use
of all.
How can one man say it belongs to him only?"
--Massasoit

"Only when the last tree has been cut down,
only when the last river has been poisoned,
only when the last fish has been caught,
only then will you realize your money cannot be eaten."
--an old Cree saying? Maybe not; but good.

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much
of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem,
but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
--Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" (1979)

"There is in gardens a plant which one ought to leave dry, although most people water it. It is the weed called Envy."
--Cosimo de Medici

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
Albert Camus, "Lyrical and Critical Essays" (1970)

"When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty."     (Spurious Quotation!)
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." (Spurious Quotation!)
--Thomas Jefferson
First known appearance in print, attributed to Thomas Jefferson: 2006. This statement has not been found in Thomas Jefferson's writings, although it captures some of the ideas that Jefferson expressed in the Declaration of Independence, e.g. "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government".

"Why do I need NOAA? I've got a weather app.", is equivalent
to asking, "Why do I need farms? I can go to the supermarket."
[About NOAA]

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism."   
--U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1938

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."
--Ronald Reagan

"Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."
--Pope John Paul II

"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
--George Orwell

"Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."
--George Orwell

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed."
--Thomas Jefferson

"Feelings are not facts."
--??

"I've learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did, but
people will never forget how you made them feel."
--Maya Angelou

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."
--Tom Lehrer (American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician; 2000?)

"I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush.
I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers,
I want to vaporize them."
--Tom Lehrer (American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician; 2003)

"Nothing succeeds like excess."
--Oscar Wilde

"Emotional reasoning assumes that what you feel must be true."
--Dr. Anne Dranitsari

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
--Ansel Adams, American photographer

"Faith is based on belief without evidence, whereas
Science is based on evidence without belief."
--Ralph Lewis, M.D.

"WHO says it can't be done?"
--Arthur D. Little

"Kindness and inclusion,
not hatred and division,
are true American values."
--Tammy Baldwin, the first openly-gay U.S. Senator.

"No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as
Donald Trump. Now I realize that he's a total Fascist.
He is the most dangerous person to this country."
-- General Mark Milley, a retired chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff
"That angered Trump so much that he removed the portrait of General Mark Milley from the Pentagon wall that traditionally features portraits of the retired chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
--Bob Woodward, journalist (reported in 2024 that Milley had told him this).

"Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt."
--John Muir