The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues

Rating:
Summary: Boring, boring, boring
Review: i bought this book because a)i colelct quotes and b)it sounded controversial. Boy was i ever disappointed

Do you know what an anarchist is? There are punks who sing down with the government. There are workers who hate government rules and taxes. There are business men who want an end to regulations. And then there are "intellectuals" who use big words to fill hundreds of pages on steady state economies and the like. Remember Karl Marx, the long winded Marxist who droned on about the proletariat, the bourgeious (sp?) and the formation of capital? This book reads just like that

While i suppose these are, technically, quotes, most are several paragraphs long. Is it really a book of quotes when each quote is half a page long? You certainly aren't going to be memorizing any of these - they are way too long

These quotes aren't controversial, unless of course your audience loves to use the word proletariat. Most of these quotes are just plain confusing. And they're all boring. Boring, boring, boring

The book is horribly one sided. It's not biased towards liberals, it's biased towards long winded "intellectuals" who like big words and vague concepts

Bottom line, you won't be quoting these in conversation, using them in term papers or discussing them at group functions. i'm hard pressed to say when you would ever use these quotes - they're just so long and elitistly boring. i really wanted to like a book with a name like "the heretics book of quotations", but i just couldn't

Rating:
Summary: Great Stuff!
Review: I love this book. I originaly bought it just for shits and giggles- but I've ended up using it for spicing up many articles and countless e-mails. An essential piece of reference material for the anarchist, atheist, dissident and all around provocateur.

Rating:
Summary: absolutely indispensable--and addictive as heck
Review: I purchased Bufe's eclectic collection of banter and agitprop some three(+) years ago, and haven't tired of it one bit. Initially, I thought it might be a good resource for writing, which it is, but was surprised to find myself constantly picking it up between projects, thumbing through it while on the phone, etc.

My only misgivings, as mild as they are, concern Bufe's, at times, transparent partisanship. Favoring Anarchism, he seems to present its patron saints (Bakunin, Goldman, et al.) in a more generous light than Marxists and other Socialists--and his representative sample of Christians and Christian thought flirts (tirelessly) with the straw-person fallacy. (Don't believe the hype--Jesus was a Socialist)

All in all, 'The Handbook' is a progressive's gold mine; I highly recommend it to any thoughtful person.