Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

I got this book just for a bit of amusement, but it has turned out to be an excellent reference for written papers. It smashes many historic misconceptions about famous people (ie. founding fathers were all Christian) and provides you with sharp, smashing responses to important issues.

I have only one complaint. That is mostly only leftist views are printed.

Chaz Bufe did an excellent job with this book, and the illustrations are often funny too. I would like to see more work done on it in a future edition.

This book is full of radical ideas. The author really did bust his butt to come up w/ a book that will compliment any economics, political "science", sociology, history, and religion class. It's a great resource for writing papers, casual reading, and of course, holding down that antigravitational device known as a coffee table. It's witty and insightful cover to cover (so rare for any publication these days).

Like another reviewer, I've used the quotes from this "Handbook" in countless emails, postings on message boards and so forth.
The remarks are culled from the works of well-known figures like Oscar Wilde, and lesser-known thinkers like Errico Malatesta.
This book illustrates, among other things, why the establishment has made such an effort to mis-define "anarchism," which isn't about chaos and violence, but is actually a sophisticated ideology of human freedom and cooperation.
I'll simply share this quotation from Rudolf Rocker, from his book, "Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism":
Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of social life into the straitjacket of its rules. Its intellectual expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its representatives also, and renders them often stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feelings.
It was from this understanding that modern anarchism was born and draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about intellectual and social transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and brings forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual, social, and political oppression, which finds its highest expression in the philosophy of anarchism, is the prerequisite of the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity."

For more on Rocker, I'd recommend this book that Noam Chomsky does the preface for. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Working Classics)

This book has been a staple of my right-next-to-the-reading-chair shelf for several years. The quotations in this book introduced me to such wonderful authors, now all-but ignored in the mainstream media, as Robert Ingersoll, H. L. Mencken, and Ambrose Bierce. Truly indispensable for those who are looking for something beyond the "Party Line".

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