October 17, 2016: 3 great Americans

October 17 in history (from Wikipedia)

1979 – The Department of Education Organization Act is signed into law creating the US Department of Education and US Department of Health and Human Services.

Because nothing makes something better than new, bigger bureaucracies. 

Birthday quotes I

"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult."

"When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. … No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion."

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

- Arthur Miller  (17 October 1915 – 10 February 2005)


Birthday quotes II

"The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit."

"All political power is primarily an illusion. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth."

"Media, the plural of mediocrity."

- Jimmy Breslin (October 17, 1930) 


Happy Birthday Michael McKean!





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