Quotables

A fear of many who protest the opening of this clinic is that doctors there will fertilize myriad eggs and discard the “extras” and the abnormal as if they were no more meaningful than a dish of caviar. But this fear seems largely unwarranted.

—Comment made by columnist Ellen Goodman in January 1980 about the opening of an IVF clinic in Virginia. (Via: Yuval Levin )

[P]erhaps the loss of Jessica [a stand-in for an ideal, though unrequited, object of desire] turns you into a true conservative. This is someone who believes that the treasures you inherited are probably more important than what you chose for yourself, that your family, your community, your culture, about which you had no choice, are the true gifts and all that you were ambitious to acquire on your own — fame, wealth, an elegant prose style, mastery of the tango, Jessica — are less true. This is the great divide in society: Some people accept who they are and settle into it and thrive on the predictable, and others are restless searchers and keep rewriting their lives, ever in the market for some new scheme, a new prophet, the newest True Light.

—Garrison Keillor on ” Life’s Variety Pack .” (Via: Boundless )

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

—George Will on ” The Climate-Change Travesty .”

After giving birth to her first baby in the hospital, Schoenborn, 31, chose to have her next four children at home — by herself. Although her husband was in the house during the births, he didn’t help with the deliveries.

“My hospital births were very managed,” says Schoenborn. “I wanted privacy and to be free of internal exams. I wanted to give birth in an upright position and they want you to lie down. I feel birth is an instinctive process and in the hospital they treat women like they’re broken and birth like an illness.”

—From MSNBC’s More women choose do-it-yourself births (Via: Kottke )

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged . One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

— John Rogers