Sedulia's Quotations

Nicholas Ellison: Is Disney notorious for having a legal department the size of Western Europe?

"This is an old, old story in Hollywood," said literary agent Nicholas Ellison, who has represented numerous clients in book-to-film negotiations...."Is Disney notorious for having a legal department the size of Western Europe and being particularly ferocious? Yes. But that doesn't mean that they're unethical. Or different from any other studio."

  --From a story on Deborah Gregory, the author of the Cheetah Girls novels, who received a total of $125,000 over nine years from Disney. Disney made two hit television movies of Cheetah Girls and is filming a third, sold millions of CDs and DVDs, and has "flooded the market with Cheetah Girls shoes, dolls, toothbrushes, video games, backpacks, note pads, pillows, posters, T-shirts and the like. Josh Getlin in the Los Angeles Times, 13 February 2008

Mitt Romney and L. Ron Hubbard

Romney admitted that his favorite novel is Battleship Earth, written by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

  --"The Harvard 100: The Most Influential Alumni" in 02138, a magazine about Harvard

Mary Katherine Stout praises President George W. Bush for his brave stand against universal health care

Many Republicans foolishly thought they could create a limited health-care program for kids and avoid ending up with full blown HillaryCare. What they didn't seem to appreciate was that Schip was itself a baby step toward universal health care.

   --Mary Katherine Stout in the Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2007

Our current system, non-universal health care:

*Sign next to an airport cafe cash register last summer

Gibbon: The true interest of an absolute monarch generally coincides with that of his people

The true interest of an absolute monarch generally coincides with that of his people. Their numbers, their wealth, their order, and their security, are the best and only foundations of his real greatness; and were he totally devoid of virtue, prudence might supply its place, and would dictate the same rule of conduct.

  --Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1788), Vol. 1, ch. V.

Emerson: An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Essay on Self-Reliance"

Nikki Giovanni: You must not be "a man of your time."

You can't be "a man of your time."

   --Nikki Giovanni (1943-), poet, on why people must resist the evils of their own era. She was discussing the wife of a 1960s Klansman who had recently said that her husband "was a man of his time" and wouldn't have behaved that way nowadays.

Gibbon on Romans preferring bread to freedom

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

   --From The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 29 (1776-88), by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

Gibbon on the early Roman emperors' taste in love

[Speaking of Hadrian's favorite, Antinous, at left, who was deified after his death] Yet we may remark that of the first fifteen emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.

       --Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1788), Vol. 1, ch. II, footnote 31.

William O. Douglas on the right to be let alone

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

  --Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas (1898-1980)

Bush adminstration classifies info on cell phone coverage

[Reports on cell-phone outages are classified to prevent the public from seeing where and when cell phone companies have outages.]

Tompkins said the blanket removal of the entire [cell-phone] outage report system from public view  was symptomatic of a larger trend in the Bush administration.

"Every time we turn around something else is a national security issue," he said. Furthermore, if some larger pattern of cell phone outages could be gleaned from the reports, he said, companies might "fix it, not bury it."

"I can't think of one problem that has gone away because it's kept a secret," he said.

   --Al Tompkins, a Freedom of Information Act expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank, quoted in MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles