“It wouldn’t do to let her debate Billy Jerome, which would be like throwing a stick of cotton candy at a flame thrower.”
Ecochondriacs, p. 175
If You Want the Congregation to Apply, Show Them How
“These last times grow very frequent with some men, till you have the race of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague thoughts, and do no work. It is a danger of all ardent minds. The only salvation, if one finds himself verging to it, is an unsparing rule that no idea, however abstract, shall be every counted as satisfactorily received and grasped till it has opened to us its practical side and helped us somehow in our work”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 77
Stands to Reason
“It turns out that there are behaviors that are widely accepted at libertarian conferences that don’t really comport with the laws as they are currently structured. This is particularly the case if we are talking about fifteen-year-old girls, which we are.”
Ecochondriacs, p. 170
The Hotel Might Have Other Motives
“But you don’t save a planet—which doesn’t even need saving in the first place—by convincing hotel chains to try to get out of washing your towels every day. And showing the guests a little cardboard picture of a cute koala, the one that your unwashed towel will somehow mysteriously save”
Ecochondriacs, p. 168
Which is Why His Staff Would Stand Upwind
“He was an ugly little man, and dapper, and what he didn’t know about dirty politics wasn’t worth knowing. He looked like a civilized man, but if you looked straight into his brown eyes, you could see the sewage pumps. On a bad day you could smell them”
Ecochondriacs, p. 161
Or Very Dead
“His little simian nose meant that some of his fights had gotten a little personal, in that his adversaries would taunt him about it. But they were all very sorry now, either that or dead”
Ecochondriacs, p. 160
Other People Are Always the Problem
“Money in politics was not necessarily corrupting. However, other people’s money in other people’s causes was most definitely corrupting, and was a corruption not to be tolerated”
Ecochondriacs, p. 159
Or Maybe Two Oriental Despots
“And since that time, the three of them had enjoyed the kind of life that an oriental despot might envy. Peeled grapes, tapestried barges on the Nile, a long line of nubile activists, the lot”
Ecochondriacs, p. 158
Their Favorite Kind of Lazy River
“He had only been a true believer for a couple of years at the beginning because he had been intelligent enough to figure out what was going on with the numbers. But by the time he figured it out completely, he was already floating on an inner tube down a lazy river of cash grants, and he realized that if he told the world what he now knew, that lazy river of cash grants would go flow somewhere else”
Ecochondriacs, p. 157
There’s a Double Meaning in That
“His slip was starting to show, which meant that his slips were starting to show”
Ecochondriacs, p. 157