Potter Stewart was the US Supreme Court justice who said, in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), “I shall not today attempt further to define (pornography)… But I know it when I see it…”
I was reading In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré, and he quotes Augustine: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not…” (Book XI, ~400AD)
So Mr. Stewart had a bit of prior art on that idea.
“As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I’m not going to use them up.”
— Samuel Delany, in an interview in The Paris Review.
“It’s discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty, and how few by deceit.”
Noël Coward
Blithe Spirit
(This is partly a test to see if copy/paste works with formatting intact)
I’m going to use the opening of “The Night We Met,” by Lord Huron. This is mostly to see if I can play with the typeface for the Quote attribute.
I am not the only traveler…
Who has not repaid his debt.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Yes, it looks meme-like. It was made by me, at a meme generation site (I forget which one). The quote comes from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, back in the old days on the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom on USENET. It’s a good chunk of why I have the US flag emoji up on the header on top.
As Patrick pointed out at the time, the US flag, as a symbol, is not feared by many traditionalists around the world because it represents rah-rah chauvinism, or our powerful military. No, it’s feared as a symbol because it represents the kind of ideas he lists.
