Things that Bansai left for us

[Toeprint]

"I say on the air all the time, "if you take what I say as gospel, you're an idiot.""
— Glenn Beck

bansaisequoia
March 29, 2011, 8:54 pm
That's the most clever quote I've ever seen from him.

[Toeprint]

"The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation."
— Pierre Elliott Trudeau

nelnose
October 11, 2010, 8:19 pm
Here comes the Tea party.
bansaisequoia
March 7, 2011, 8:43 pm
And the Tea Party is hosted by a Mad Hatter.

[Toeprint]

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "
— John Updike

bansaisequoia
December 3, 2011, 7:41 pm
John Updike's middle name was his mother's maiden name. His mother was a Hoyer.

[Toeprint]

"I've never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful."
— Unattributed

bansaisequoia
September 4, 2011, 9:10 pm
(link)

[Toeprint]

"I'm proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is - I could be just as proud for half the money."
— Arthur Godfrey

bansaisequoia
October 20, 2012, 6:23 pm
Mitt Romney is proud to be paying half the money. And that's just in the one year he's revealed.

[Toeprint]

"I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it."
— Dwight Eisenhower


eoerikson3
May 5, 2009, 8:04 am
Too many people on the planet that are complacent with the feeling that you can't fight city hall will prevent the revolution that is needed. The government is too big to fight now.
bansaisequoia
June 21, 2009, 1:23 am
They are not complacent with a feeling that you can't fight City Hall; they are sullenly resigned. The money and power to influence the masses always seems to go to the wrong people.

[Toeprint]

"Motherhood is a wonderful thing - what a pity to waste it on children."
— Judith Pugh

bansaisequoia
March 26, 2011, 3:36 am
That seems kind of bi-polar.

[Toeprint]

"Somehow a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever. "
— Helen Rowland

bansaisequoia
April 15, 2012, 4:09 pm
But I'm working on it.

[Toeprint]

"The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization."
— John Kemeny

bansaisequoia
July 25, 2014, 9:13 am
John Kemeny? Wasn't he the guy who was shot from that book suppository or Grassy Moll or wherever?

[Toeprint]

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Douglas Bradbury

bansaisequoia
November 9, 2012, 11:08 pm
If the writing comes from a condensed book, it's like it came from a distillery, and you get even drunker.

[Toeprint]

"Never love anything that can't love you back."
— Bruce Williams

bansaisequoia
January 18, 2011, 10:38 pm
Not even Debussy CDs or Justice League comic books?

[Toeprint]

"I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches."
— Alice Roosevelt Longworth

bansaisequoia
January 12, 2010, 5:19 am
In a 60 Minutes interview in 1974, she proudly told Eric Sevareid that she was a "hedonist." [as per wikipedia] That certainly goes along with the "scratch where it itches."

[Toeprint]

"Art is Art. Everything else is everything else."
— Ad Reinhardt

CryptoBee
October 12, 2018, 2:10 am
If there is insufficient data and you set a new record, does that mean bansequoia hasn’t had a crack at it?
kahvecowgirl
March 11, 2019, 12:59 am
Bansai seems to have gone missing. I hope he's doing ok, somewhere out there in the strange universe outside this site.
crypto-yes
September 12, 2019, 5:41 pm
I noticed that too, kahvecowgirl. Wonder where he is...
LLapp
January 20, 2020, 11:53 pm
So sad to read the concerned comments above. I also was worried about him for quite a while, before we found out that he'd died on Sept. 24, 2019, at age 57. (link)

[Toeprint]

"The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils. "
— Pliny the Elder

maradnu
February 15, 2009, 9:02 pm
That is depressing & cynical.
bansaisequoia
September 12, 2012, 9:29 pm
He said they weren't equal. He didn't say the enjoyments didn't exceed the evils. The glass is completely full of water and air.
themunchlet
August 18, 2013, 4:29 am
No, sorry, disagree with the interpretation above -- it truly is a depressing and cynical statement. I know this was written in Latin, not English, but the idiomatic meaning is clear: the enjoyments of this life are NOT EVEN EQUAL to its evils -- in other words, less than the evils. That's not the literal reading, true, but it is implied. And, as a rule, we understand language idiomatically, not literally. Sorry, Bansai.
CarpeLanam
October 23, 2020, 2:56 pm
"Quid, quod bona malis paria non sunt etiam pari numero, nec laetitia ulla minimo maerore pensanda? Natural History 7:41. This was part of a larger philosophical point, that the best mortals can hope for is that they are not unhappy. Even the Thracians, he said, who would deposit a white or black stone in an urn every day, and then at the end of their life count to see if happy days outnumbered the unhappy, would be better if they accepted that no amount of happiness could outweigh even a little grief. It's typical of the Stoic philosophy of the Romans. Fame and fortune and long life are illusions; we must accept our fate with a calm mind and not be prone to extremes of emotion.

[Toeprint]

"In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running."
— Jeff Bezos

bansaisequoia
October 17, 2014, 3:17 pm
I drank so much coffee once, my tongue lapped the air between each flit of a hummingbird's wings. I also cleaned between the teeth of an operating radial saw at a sawmill.