Cockeyed Ambition To Conquer

"The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight."

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

A Cantankerous Chruch Choir

The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Grinding Axe

"As a boy, I would sometimes do my homework in a little anteroom off his office. I would leave the door ajar and listen as he talked with visitors. It was there that I got my first exposure to politics and government. My father had told me that if I listened closely I would hear the sound most familiar to the ears of an elected politician - the sound of the grinding of an axe."

- Preston Manning. Think Big: Adventures in Life and Democracy