Many thanks to all. I now have a vast file of Derb quotes. Definitely
enough for a talking doll–I shall contact the manufacturers.
Some favorites, each mentioned many times over:
*** Journalists are scum.
*** Is this any way for free people to live?
*** Cry Havoc! And let slip the appropriate dogs.
*** I don’t see how you can ever have enough nukes.
*** I do have some opinions that aren’t very respectable.
*** Like any honest reactionary, I loathe the _New York Times_.
*** For most people, college education is a waste of time and money.
*** The ducks aren’t ever going to line up. The ducks are trying to kill
you.
*** American society is increasingly a conspiracy of the smart against the
dumb.
*** Marriage is one of those things that works best when people don’t think
about it too much.
*** The Middle East contains three hundred million people, and most of them
are crazy as coots.
*** Carve into your mind in great stone letters: This nation is the hope,
and the conscience, of the world.
*** Let’s face it, in the great 20th-century struggle between the state and
the individual, the state has won, game, set, and match.
*** The fact is that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not
well correlated with intelligence, or with other varieties of stupidity.
*** Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a
well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy
free health care and 100 percent literacy.
*** I want to live among people who can read, write, give correct change and
name the capital of their state. Beyond that, I think education is a luxury
that people should pay for themselves.
*** Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind’s ability to
make generalizations, without which science and mathematics, not to mention
much of everyday life, would be impossible.
*** This is life. People stumble and grope blindly hither and thither,
wondering if they did the right thing, occasionally knocking something over
and hoping no-one noticed, striving for illusory goals, addled with guilt
and insecurity.
*** Look at our fool diplomats, poring over their treaties and resolutions
and communiqués, while young men with burning eyes slip silently into our
cities with boxes, canisters, cargoes, vials, and suitcases curiously heavy.
Look at this proud tower! And feel its foundations tremble.
*** Does it not occur to you…that by purging all sacred images,
references, and words from our public life, you are leaving us with nothing
but a cold temple presided over by the Goddess of Reason — that counterfeit
deity who, as history has proved time and time and time again, inspires no
affection, retains no loyalties, soothes no grief, justifies no sacrifice,
gives no comfort, extends no charity, displays no pity, and offers no hope,
except to the tiny cliques of fanatical ideologues who tend her cold blue
flame?