It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Civil libertarians have consistently insisted on America’s sacred duty to make the country a place of unprecedented religious tolerance. Faced however, with the realities of religious pluralism — multiplying sects and excessive fervor for seemingly bizarre religious tenets — they have reacted with something short of enthusiasm.

— R. Laurence Moore,
Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans

W[hen] they enact tyrannical laws, forbidding us the free exercise of our religion, we cannot submit. . . . God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven we will be ranged under the banner of heaven and against the Government. The United States says we cannot marry more than one wife. God says different. . . . Polygamy is a divine institution. It has been handed down direct from God. The United States cannot abolish it. No nation on earth can prevent it, nor all the nations on earth combined; these are my sentiments and all of you who sympathize with me in this position will raise your right hands. I defy the United States; I will obey God.

— John Taylor
Third president, prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon Church
January 4, 1880
during a Sunday assembly in Great Salt Lake City

The best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show. . . . The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. . . .

— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

[I]n 1915 Utah became the first state in the Union to criminalize marijuana. The impetus for the ban came from the LDS Church, which was concerned about increasing marijuana use among its members. Latter-day Saints, it turns out, were way ahead of the curve when it came to smoking dope, thanks to the polygamists who’d developed a taste for cannabis in Mexico, where some six thousand of them had fled by the early years of the twentieth century to escape federal prosecution. In the summer of 1912, the Mexican Revolution flared through northern Mexico, and the escalating violence compelled most of the expatriate polygamists to return to Utah, where they introduced marijuana into the broader Mormon culture, alarming the LDS general authorities.

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

After having been an administrator for some time, I can say that “evil” is just “random” from a different perspective.

— Paul Matthews

There is really no basic difference between the results of automatism and the products of chance; total determinacy comes to be identical with total indeterminacy.

— G. Ligeti

To multiply the telling would be too little
For the multitude of fact that filled my journey.

— The Inferno of Dante
Translated by Robert Pinsky

Souls who are good

Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear
Charon complaining at your presence, consider
What that means.

Too many have fallen, too many feel they have failed. The pressures upon us, the promises we cannot keep with ourselves — these things are making monsters of too many of us.

— Dave Eggers, What is the What

Here is the subtle but magnificent scene in the evening sky tonight from Scatterbranch, TX. The labels were added after the fact to help you navigate. Get outside and look! Tomorrow night the moon will be right next to Jupiter. Notice that the three planets all form a straight line – that is the plane of our solar system. Earth’s Moon formed after the rest of this stuff and its orbit is slightly different. Which is why it is not “lined up” with the rest.

— Grady Price Blount

McCartney points up at the corner staircase, which leads to the windowed control room where George Martin and the engineers worked. “That was where the grownups lived,” he says. “Those stairs were so iconic, it’s engraved in your memory like a dream.”

— Brian Hiatt
Rolling Stone
March 1, 2012

More and more Wall Street types are undergoing testosterone treatments “in the hope of being turned into alpha males,” said Charles Wallace in the Financial Times. Exhausted from “working Stakhanovite hours” and fearful of losing their jobs, many bankers and traders hope male-hormone supplements will “sharpen their faculties and makes them more competitive.” Dr. Lionel Bissoon, who once treated women for cellulite on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, now specializes in testosterone therapy. “Ninety percent of my patients have some involvement in the finance industry,” he says. While some blame testosterone for the “machismo and aggressive risk-taking” that caused the financial crisis, Bissoon’s patients swear by the stuff. It promotes “the positive side of aggression,” says John, 40, a venture capital executive.

— The Week, February 24, 2012