He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parrellism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.
P.J O’Rourke
I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.
JG Ballard
I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year's Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance.
— Leonard Cohen
…how after all that fierce planning
I could grow up to be the soft ineffectual synthesis
of untold compromises that I am today.
The plum you're going to eat next summer
doesn't exist yet; its potential
lives inside a tree you'll never see
in an orchard you'll never see, will be touched
by a certain number of water droplets
before it reaches you, by certain angles
of light, by a finite amount of bugs
and dust motes and hands
you'll never know. The plum you are
going to eat next summer will gather
sugar, gather mass, will harden
at its center so it can soften toward
your mouth. The plum
you're going to eat next
summer doesn't know
you exist. The plum you are
going to eat next summer
is growing just for you.
— Gayle Brandeis