Raymond Chandler Quotes-A History Talks Vol 1, Issue 18

Raymond Chandler 1888-1959(1959-03-26)})))))_)) Quotes

“To hell with the rich, they make me sick.”

“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”
Pearls are a Nuisance

“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”

“The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”

“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

“Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.”

“California, the department store state.”

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

“Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get.”
The Lady in the Lake

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps
art from becoming ridiculous.”

“All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.”

“A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)”

“Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.”

“Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.”

“And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.”

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”

“There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.”

“I certainly admire people who do things.”

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

“Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way.”
The Big Sleep

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”

“Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cookies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them. (from) "The High Window”

“The challenge is to write about real things magically.”

“...had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.”

“If you can get past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of human intelligence, and if you can go out into the night and see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats, but not from the awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do these things and still feel the next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single, intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong because this sort of vulgarity, the very vulgarity from which the Oscars are made, is the inevitable price that Hollywood exacts from each of its serfs.”

“The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.”

“The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants.”

 

Hunter S. Thompson Quotes A History Talks Vol 1, Issue 17

 

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of True Romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely -- at least, not all the time -- but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.” “THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

“THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”

“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”

“It never got weird enough for me.”

“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.”

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed--for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off.”

Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation On History/A History Talks Vol 1 issue 16

Click on the link for this discussion between Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali - On History  at the New York Library in 2012

 

In working together on two challenging new documentaries —South of the Border and the forthcoming Showtime series Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States—filmmaker Oliver Stone engaged with author and filmmaker Tariq Ali in a probing, hard-hitting conversation on the politics of history. Their dialogue brings to light a number of forgotten—or deliberately buried—episodes of American history, from the U.S. intervention against the Russian Revolution, to the dynamic radicalism of the Wobblies, how Henry Wallace’s nomination for the vice-presidency was deliberately thwarted by Democratic Party machine insiders, to the ongoing close connections between various U.S. presidents and the Saudi royal family. For Stone and Ali—two of our most insightful observers on history and popular culture—no topic is sacred, no orthodoxy goes unchallenged.
 

About the authors

 

Oliver Stone has directed, among other films Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, W., World Trade Center, Any Given Sunday, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Heaven and Earth, JFK, The Doors, Born on The Fourth of July, Talk Radio, Wall Street, Platoon, Salvador, and the documentaries Looking for Fidel, Comandante, Persona Non Grata, South of the Border, and the upcoming Untold History of the United States series for Showtime.

Tariq Ali is an internationally acclaimed Pakistani writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London.

Joe Bageant Quotes: A History Talks Vol 1, Issue 15

Joe Bageant

The following quotes are from Joe Bageant's (1946–2011) classic Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

“The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda”

 

“Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "Listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with every cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose an eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia.”

 

“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.”

 

“This book is written from a changing town in Virginia, but this class of mine, these people--the ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting, and praise Jesus for a truck with no spare tire--exist in every state in our nation. Maybe the next time we on the left encounter such seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God-obsessed folks, we can be open to their trials, understand the complexity of their situation, even have enough solidarity to pop for a cheap retread tire out of our own pockets, simply because that would be the kind thing to do and surely would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mohandas Gandhi smile.”

 

“man! Can you believe they actually allow this stuff to be sold over there? Glad we got laws against that crap in this country." I remind him that the socialist party is probably the largest political party on the planet. "Aw bullshit!" he said. I asked, "Then what the hell do you think is the largest party?" "The Republican Party of course! We're the only country with real political parties." Now this is from a guy who has an MBA from one of the South's universities, holds local office, and has influenced public affairs.”

 

“Remember when welfare mothers were robbing us all blind and driving Cadillacs? ”

From Honk If You Love Caviar

 

"How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton's wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters -- huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys."

"Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all."

"Yessiree, it was gonna be a "systemic collapse," by god, and if you needed proof, just look at the way both George Bush and Barack Obama agreed that some American corporations were too big to let sink, therefore it was time for the public to start bailing out the boat. Meanwhile, the royal economists were unanimous in that this "rescue" was going to require another 10 trillion bucks somewhere down the pike -- a very short pike. So it must all be damned serious and we gotta do this thing. Right folks?

In an unusual display of common sense, the American public said "Bullshit," by margins of three or four to one, depending upon region. That did not bother political and economic elites much. What the fuck do the proles know anyway?"

 

 

Ernest Hemingway A History Talks Volume 1-1ssue 14

Ernest Hemingway Quote 1899-1961

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“All thinking men are atheists.”

A Farewell to Arms

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

“But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated. ”

The Old Man and the Sea

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

Death in the Afternoon

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”

“Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything. ”

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

“Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”

The Old Man and the Sea

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her”

To Have and Have Not

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

“Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.”

 

George Orwell Quotes-A History Talks Vol 1-Issue 13

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell

 

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

 If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

 To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

 Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

 Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.

 Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words: it is war minus the shooting.

 Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.

 The great enemy of clear language is insincerity

 To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

 For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

 Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

 All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

 The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

 An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

 Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

 Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

 At age 50, every man has the face he deserves.

 On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.

 Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

 Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

 Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

 Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

 If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

 We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

 Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

 War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
― Politics and the English Language

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

― Down and Out in Paris and London

 

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
― Why I Write

 

Kurt Vonnegut A History Talks Vol 1-Issue 12

Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut US novelist (1922 -2007)

 

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.  

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

How nice to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

 

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the centre.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.  

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?  

Joesph Heller- A History Talks Vol 1, Issue 11

Quotes from Joseph Heller (1923-1999) and his Classic Catch 22

 




Every writer I know has trouble writing.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.




Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.



I think in every country that there is at least one executive who is scared of going crazy.


Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.


Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.


The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.


We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.


When I grow up I want to be a little boy. When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as "Catch-22" I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?"


Catch 22 Quotes

Quote 1: "an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him." Chapter 2, pg. 29

Quote 2: "He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive." Chapter 3, pg. 38

Quote 3: "You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?" Chapter 4, pg. 48

Quote 4: "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle." Chapter 5, pg. 55

Quote 5: "'Catch-22...says you've always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to.
"'But Twenty-seventh Air Force says I can go home with forty missions.'
"'But they don't say you have to go home. And regulations do say you have to obey every order. That's the catch. Even if the colonel were disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions, you'd still have to fly them, or you'd be guilty of disobeying an order of his. And then the Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters would really jump on you.'" Chapter 6, pg. 68

Quote 6: "History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war." Chapter 8, pg. 75

Quote 7: "The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with." Chapter 8, pg. 80

Quote 8: "With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway." Chapter 9, pg. 111

Quote 9: "Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead." Chapter 12, pg. 133-134

Quote 10: "You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail." Chapter 13, pg. 149

Quote 11:"Yossarian's heart sank. Something was terribly wrong if everything was all right and they had no excuse for turning back."
Chapter 14, pg. 150

Quote 12: Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!" Chapter 15, pg. 157

Quote 13: "They couldn't dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn't keep death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian's tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane." Chapter 17, pg.176
Quote 14: The chaplain had "failed miserably, had choked up once again in the face of opposition from a stronger personality. It was a familiar, ignominious experience, and his opinion of himself was low." Chapter 20, pg. 208

Quote 15: "But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share." Chapter22, pg. 241

Quote 16: "'What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many counties can't all be worth dying for.'" Chapter 23, pg. 257

Quote 17: "This time Milo had gone to far. Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for him...Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made." Chapter 24, pg. 269

Quote 18: "You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" Chapter 27, pg. 309

Quote 19: "that's the way things go when you elevate mediocre people to positions of authority." Chapter 29, pg. 335

Quote 20: "Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action." Chapter 31, pg. 355

Quote 21: "It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean to disappear somebody?" Chapter 34, pg. 378

Quote 22: "And looking very superior, he tossed down on the table a photostatic copy of a piece of V mail in which everything but the salutation "Dear Mary" had been blocked out and on which the censoring officer had written, 'I long for you tragically. A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.'" Chapter 36, pg. 393

Quote 23: "Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them." Chapter 39, pg. 415

Quote 24: "We've got your pal, buddy. We've got your pal." Chapter 41, pg. 446

Quote 25: "Run away to Sweden, Yossarian. And I'll stay here and persevere. Yes. I'll persevere. I'll nag and badger Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn every time I see them. I'm not afraid." Chapter 42, pg. 461

John "Cummo" Cummins & Neville "Killer" Kane/A History Talks Vol 1 issue 10

This is from my book Singing Johnny Cash In The Cardiac Ward A personal story of heart disease and music.


"It was the week before the 2011 AFL Grand Final between Geelong and Collingwood. It was the first time I’d been in Melbourne at grannie time since 1980 and it hit me that grand final was the week leading up to, as well as the big game on Saturday. As I watched the game in Cobourg’s Post Office Hotel, which was packed to the rafters with Collingwood and Geelong supporters, I realised the sprit of contest wasn’t just confined to the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The Tuesday after I caught up with my good friend Neville “Killer” Kane and his wife Margaret at their home in Longwarry in Mid Gippsland. Killer had been fighting leukaemia for a while. He lost that battle in March 2012.  I played my guitar to them and sang some Johnny Cash songs plus my version of Roaring Jack’s Lads of the BLF, which was also played at Killer’s funeral.  Alistair Hulett, who wrote Lads of the BLF, died from liver cancer in late January 2010 in his native Glasgow. He was 58. We used to share a house in the Sydney suburb of Glebe when Roaring Jack, the fantastic folk/punk band he was part of, were the resident performers at Newtown’s Sandringham Hotel.

 

I also played them Back Home in Derry. That song is based on the poem The Voyage by Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands and was made famous as a song by the great Irish singer Christy Moore. My dad Vic’s maternal grandparents were of the Stain. His grandfather, William Phillips, was an English convict and his grandmother, Catherine Batt, was an Irish convict, and both were sent to Van Diemen's Land, the original name for Tasmania. When I learnt that, the song had a new meaning for me, and it should for anyone with ancestors who came to Australia in chains as boat people on convict ships.

It was around that time, while I was waiting for the operation, that I became more reflective about friends who had passed away over the years. While I was at Killer and Margret’s home, they showed me the BLF flag, a Eureka Flag from one of the crane occupations of 1986. It had the names of some very close friends on it: Yuri Lasic, John Loh, Kyran Nicholls, Tony Maseria and Johnny “Rotten” Arnett. All up, there’s thirty four names on that flag. The only woman listed on it is Gaylene Smeaton.


I remembered the first time I met Killer. It was in late April 1986, about 7.30am on a cold Melbourne morning. A group of a dozen builders labourers were picketing a building site where they’d been sacked for refusing to resign from their union, the Builders Labourers Federation. The BLF had recently been “deregistered”, a nice term for outlawed, under Bob Hawke’s Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal government.


The ALP premiers of New South Wales and Victoria, Neville Wran and John Cain, joined Hawke’s drive to outlaw the BLF. An army of police was deployed to building sites in Melbourne, Geelong, Canberra, Sydney, Wollongong, Central Coast and Newcastle to attack the right of workers to be in the union of their choice, not that chosen by the bosses or the state.


BLF organiser John “Cummo” Cummins drove to the picket. I noticed as he opened the boot of his car that he had a large steel chain. He showed it to Neville “Killer” Kane, Jimmy “The Black Rat” Wilson and a third builders labourer. Within ten minutes, the three sacked BLF men had occupied a crane on a nearby building site. They used the chain to lock the trap door of the crane to prevent police from removing them. They had no food or water and occupied the crane for more than 72 hours. They left on their own terms after making a defiant protest and shutting the site down. They also endured three bitterly cold nights.

Killer later said about the protest: “It happened really fast. I was on the Market Street site and they [the cops] came down on the job… I was sacked because I refused to join the BWIU [Building Workers Industrial Union, now the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU)]. I could have been the shop steward on site for the BWIU, all I had to do was change over.

“But I decided to stick with the BLs. Other workers were locked on the jobs, surrounded by rows and rows of police and threatened with the sack, threatened that they couldn’t leave the site till they’d signed over to another building union.”

So it’s not surprising that a few days after Killer lost his fight with leukaemia, 175 construction workers on a Melbourne CBD building site gave him a minute’s silence. Nor is it surprising that the red flag flying over Melbourne Trades Hall was at half-mast for him. The flag was later given to Margaret. More than 400 people attended Killer’s funeral on April 2. The Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams sent a message to the funeral.

In many ways, Killer embodied the staunch, militant working-class traditions of the BLF. The union was a rank-and-file, membership-controlled organisation. It’s no wonder that Hawke and the ALP outlawed the BLF.


Hawke did his best to criminalise militant unionism. His policies in office led to one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in Australian history, which helped create today’s huge gap between the billionaires and the working poor.

Killer, and other men and women like him, opposed that in the 1980s. As a member of the BLF, he and another 500 of us suffered for our militant dissent by being blacklisted and starved out of work.

Margaret, his lifelong wife and partner, was actively involved in organising the partners and wives of BLF members during the outlawing of the union. She once appeared on Ray Martin’s Midday Show. Martin basically surrendered his show to her elegant defence of the BLF. The interview appears in my film, The Deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation − The Victorian Story 1986-1992.


Amongst the names on that Eureka Flag is John “Cummo” Cummins. He died of a brain tumour in 2006, when he was only 58 years old. He had more than 3000 people at his funeral in Melbourne, the same day that the “Crocodile Man”, Steve Irwin, was killed by a sting ray.

The Victorian CFMEU’s website says this about Cummo:

“John Cummins was an inspirational leader who touched thousands of people in the construction industry and beyond.

• 1979-1994 Builders Labourers Federation Official
• 1994-1996 CFMEU Official
• 1996-2006 President, Victorian Branch CFMEU

“John dedicated his life to working people, in particular to construction workers for the improvement of their health and wellbeing and to advance their status. He played a leading role in the former Builders Labourers Federation and was pivotal to the amalgamation with the CFMEU. John was the President of the Victorian Branch of the CFMEU from 1996.

“A social and political activist, John participated in and led many struggles, ranging from student campaigns to trade union struggles, the independence of East Timor and many community causes. He demonstrated an unswerving commitment to the right to organise. John was devoted to supporting local young people; he was the president of North Heidelberg Junior Football Club for a number of years.”

The John Cummins Memorial Fund was established with the Melbourne Community Foundation to honour his memory and legacy. The fund is the initiative of his family, friends, colleagues and comrades. Its purpose is to honour and continue in some small way his work. It raises funds for two purposes:

1) Since the fund’s inception it has donated generously to Austin Health (Melbourne’s Austin Hospital). In August 2009, Austin Health matched the funds donated by the Memorial Fund, ensuring the ongoing employment of a Brain Tumour Support Officer. This position provides support for patients diagnosed with a brain tumour, as well as their families and carers.

2) A scholarship fund to support young students or trade union members from disadvantaged backgrounds to complete their tertiary education or access higher education. The role of the scholarship is to support young people when they need it. Up to $1000 is awarded to students who display determination, commitment and passion. In 2010, scholarships were provided to fifteen students. The funds are used for maths tutoring, musical instruments, fees for specialist programs in performing arts, uniforms for hospitality courses, tools for VET courses and more.


The John Cummins Annual Dinner is held on the last Friday in August each year in the Moonee Valley Racecourse's Celebrity Room, with a usual attendance of more than 850 people. A guest speaker is invited to address the theme of “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win”. Two of the past speakers have been Gabi Hollows, Founding Director of the Fred Hollows Foundation, and Kevin Sheedy, head coach of Greater Western Sydney and four time premiership winning coach for his former club Essendon who he served for twenty seven years. Some of Australia’s best musicians have played on the night, including Chris Wilson, Mark Seymour and James Reyne.

In early 2007, Tim Gooden, the secretary of the Geelong Trades Hall, gave me a John Cummins T-shirt. I was wearing it in Katoomba one day when this woman came up to me who thought it was a picture of Johnny Cash. I cracked up laughing. The image on the T-shirt is from a stencil of Cummo when he first went to jail over the issue of union organisers having the right of entry to the workplace, when the BLF was deregistered in 1986. The image is of John Cummins with the Eureka flag behind him, Dare to Struggle Dare to Win. I said to the woman, “I’m sorry, it isn’t Johnny Cash”. I was still laughing and thinking that Johnny Cash and Cummo would’ve been laughing their heads off too."


These quotes from John "Cummo" Cummins are from The John Cummins Foundation

On religion:

The wailing wall is in Jerusalem.

&

You’re preaching to the converted.

On maternal affection:

Heads only mothers would love.

On dialectical materialism:

Let’s deal with facts and not with fiction.

On searching for enlightenment:

When you find an easy way, don’t keep it a secret.

&

The further you go, the less you know.

On holiday advice:

He thinks he’s in Disneyland.

On medical conditions:

You can’t be half pregnant.

&

You have your good days and you have bad.

On hygiene:

Don’t treat him like a dirty arse.

On the future:

It will either be fixed or fucked by the end of the week.

&

Not gonna die wondering.

On diplomacy:

Fuck off, idiot.

On legal challenges:

Just straight bat it.

On mathematics:

Six of one and half a dozen of the other.

On WorkCover advice for employers:

You fucked him, you fix him.

On sports:

As unbiased as a Collingwood cheer squad.

On fauna:

Bright eyed and bushy tailed.

and...

Tail wagging the dog.

and...

This little black duck.

On advice for young officials:

Stop sooking.

and...

This job is 90 per cent bluff and 10 per cent bullshit.

and..

You can’t organise from outside the gate.

and...

You’re only as good as your last blue.

and...

You’re big enough and ugly enough to work it out for yourself.

On persistence:

The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

On employment advice to the members:

If you don’t work for c----s, you don’t work.

On philanthropy:

Hit your kick.

Cummo on agreeing with Cummo:

That’s right, that’s right.

and...

Nod your head until your bum is on the seat.

Cummo on not agreeing withCummo:

Is that right ?

On matters of strategy:

As effective as throwing snows balls at Ayers Rock.

On how the world is treating him:

Terrific.

On unlawful industrial action:

You’re going to have a better day than I am.

On supporting East Timorese independence:

Fuck this, we’ll go and stand in front of the plane.

On relationships:

Don’t get all sensitive on me now.

and..

Don’t be shy.

and...

Put your arm around him.

On democracy:

We’ve had enough from you, you’re a serial questioner.

On unions:

Once an ironworker, always an ironworker.

On initiative:

Who gives a fuck, go fix it.

On revisionism:

Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

On outmoded thinking:

That went out with button-up boots.

On intellectualism:

Put the thinking cap on.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

Sweet.

You’ve done yourselves a treat.

Listen listen.

If you don’t dream you don’t live.

I don’t want to be Dorothy Dix.

Methinks you’re all getting treated better than Melbourne Cup favourites.

Me fix.

Scallywags.

Resident nark.

 

Builders’ Labourers’ Song, Theme song for the Concrete Gang on 3CR

We’re putting up new buildings,

we’re knocking down the old,

We’re working in the summer heat

and in the winter cold,

And the labour-power we sell, me

boys, for a hard-earned weekly pay,

Produces mighty profits for the

greedy M.B.A.

Chorus

So keep your powder dry and hold

your head up high,

It’s class to class and face to face;

our limit is the sky,

We’ve got a fighting history and we

never will be cowed,

A builders’ labourer is a name to

make a man feel proud.

And whether we were born here

or born in Italy,

In Greece or Spain or Ireland, in

England or Fiji,

We all of us are workers and united

we must stand,

Until the wealthy bludgers have

been driven from our land.

Chorus

We faced deregistration and it

backfired in their face,

We’re not fooled by arbitration and

we won’t stay ‘in our place’,

We hit the bosses hard and fast to

win and keep our gains,

And break a couple of concrete

pours to back our log of claims.

Chorus

You can order a copy of Singing Johnny Cash in The Cardiac Ward from WritersandEBooks AUD$4.99 & Paperback: AUD$9.95 plus delivery
e-Book: AUD$4.99 & Paperback: AUD$9.95 plus delivery.

About the photo on the front cover

Russell Crowe, Amanda Dole and myself outside Radio Redfern on May Day 1989. Russell had just performed a few songs on my show, Radio Solidarity. In 1988, Radio Skid Row was evicted from our studios in the basement floor of Sydney University’s Wenthworth Building. We were taken in for eighteen months by the Aborigines/Kooris at Radio Redfern, who now broadcast across Sydney through Koori Radio, until we built and opened the Radio Skid Row studios in Marrickville in 1990. Photo by Frances Kelly.