Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

"To be able to disagree is the essence of civilization. To yearn for complete agreement, utter unanimity in ideas and ideals, is the beginning of lockstep savagery."

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2015/04/05

People of religious distinction maintain that human beings exclusively possess souls, on the strength of which they may gain admittance to heaven.

Only human beings lie, device pogroms, murder for recreation, steal, libel, slander and perform crossword puzzles. This says nothing new about the condition of being human, but it does help to illuminate the special contributions of the soul.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/11/23

Deceit (noun): A dog rolls on the carcass of a dead possum in order to deceive other animals as to his identity as a dog. A man lolls in the scents of a church in order to deceive all around him as to his identity as a thief, an adulterer and a liar.

The difference is that the dog will not first have to endure being bored by the possum.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/10/12

People are quite at home with evil. It's fighting it that raises the dreadful spectre of inconvenience.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/07/13

People of a political kidney never can, never will at any time acknowledge the slightest possibility that they might be mistaken. That way lies the imminent crumbling of dogma, and the freakish implication that those holding opposite views could be, after all, tolerable, decent, even respectable.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/06/22

This is a major change and problem with our divided political system, it's gotten to the point where they can't be friendly with each other out of the office. It's one thing to respectfully disagree with the opposition, it's quite another to consider them heretical and the antithesis of all good things.

Generally speaking, the republic that cannot be made out through the swarm of czars and bureaucracies plaguing its landscape, is rather like like a dog you can't see for its fleas. The only difference is, although you'd do something to treat the dog, you certainly wouldn't bankroll its parasites.

With a republic, it is rather the reverse.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/02/09

May we maintain our sense
of absurdity in high places:
for there is no power more
destructive to the solemn
and arrogant than a chain
reaction of laughter

May the elected carry
out their trust with
respect, humility,
honor, duty...

...or lacking that,
a teleprompter
that cannot
lie.

www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2013/12/27

People are, on the whole, decent. Decency, by its nature, causes one human being to help another without urging, to offer comfort and succor without question, to politely and tacitly agree to the proscription of politics and religion as dinner conversation, to be among his own kind without taking a swing. In short, we indulge people their convictions because we are all fundamentally decent. We disagree, but we know it is inevitable and something can be borne without rancor. It is the nature of advocacy, and a right.

The foregoing, being true, is the primary bane in a politician's effort to scrabble for votes, and an obstacle over which the elect must step day in and day out – human decency is the excrement on the sidewalk of a politician's life. Overcoming decency, and scooping up large bushelfuls of votes, can be achieved only through polarizing, demonizing, and building unthinking enmity between groups of people; to manipulate crowds through the husbandry of hatred. In this approach to vote-grubbing, people are no longer capable of meaning well, but, instead, vile conservatives and degraded liberals, the Dems and Pubs, kitten poisoners and family destroyers, white hats and black hates (except, somehow, everybody is wearing a black hat). The greatest indecency exists in the slaughter of decency – decency as a belief, as an assumption, as a part of the physiognomy of humanity. In American politics, it is mostly penny-ante, a means to electoral victory. However, when any politician attempts to spoon-feed a crowd a fearful loathing of a segment of society, bypassing thought, generosity, law, and the knowledge that most people, on the whole, are decent, they are treading the low road to power, one paved to famously efficient effect by such as Hitler.

The only thing that stands between us and this lowest of roads is our sense that decency provides the maintenance of a free country.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2013/12/01

Among the military services, concepts such as courage, honor, duty and valor possess deep consequences, bearing witness to their historic readiness to shed blood in defense of the country's rights, freedoms and liberty. Among the elect, those words are the language of the patsy; best mouthed with the distractions of glory and pomp while plundering a fellow citizen's trash, tapping his phone line or, at the very best of moments, emerging victorious at computer solitaire during a session of congress.

from A Demon's Nest of Sentiments
http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2013/10/20

I am reminded of 'Character is what you are in the dark'.

"The abandonment of the republic is a matter of two steps: from being "the people" to "the governed," then "the policed.""

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2013/06/09