'Wine!' ordered Ptolemy.'Pour wine for everyone,

'Wine!' ordered Ptolemy.'Pour wine for everyone,' and then he clapped his hands and while the guests took up reclining positions on their dining beds, servants poured the wine from the crater and others began serving the food: partridge on skewer, thrush, mountain hens, duck and then a fine rarity – pheasant.
At his right hand Alexander asked for his dearest friend Hephaestion, to his left, Ptolemy, his host.
After the game came a quarter of veal – roasted and cut into pieces and served individually by the carver while the servants brought in baskets of fragant, freshly baked bread together with shelled walnuts and boiled ducks' eggs.
The flautists entered with their instruments and began to play. They were all beautiful and exotic women – Mysian, Carian, Thracian, Bythnian – and they all wore their hair tied up with coloured ribbons or bonnets fringed with silver and gold. They were dressed in imitation of the Amazon, with short tunics and bows and quivers over their shoulders, props used in the theatre.
After the first song some of them put down their bows and then, after the second song, their quivers and then took off their leggings and their tunics so that they were completely naked, their young bodies shining with perfumed oils under the light of the lamps. They began to dance to the sound of the flutes and the drums, floating in front of the tables and among the diner's beds.
The friends had all stopped eating, but they continued drinking and were now in a state of total excitement. Some of them stood up, took off their clothes and joined in the dance with the accelerating rhythm of the drums and the tambourines carrying them inexorably towards a climax.
Suddenly Ptolomy grabbed a girl by the hand, stopping her gyrations and manoeuvring her so that Alexander could get a good look.
She's the most beautiful of the lot,' he said. 'I've grabbed her for you.'
'And for me? Asked Hepshastion
'Do you like this one?' Alexander asked as he stopped another striking girl, this one with red hair.
Ptolemy had given orders to the servants to fill the lamps in such a way that some of them would have run out of oil before others, leaving the room in a sort of half shadow.
The youngsters fondled one another as they lay on the dining beds, and on the rugs and the skins that covered part of the paved floor. Meanwhile the music of the flautist continued to ring against the frescoed walls, almost giving rhythm to their excited panting and the surging of ther gleaming bodies in the glow of the few lamps that were still burning in the corners of the great room.

From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday

“Giving lots of money to the public schools makes you money!”

“Giving lots of money to the public schools makes you money!”
When our pathetic schools send a generation of idiots and illiterates out into work-a-day world, how in God's name do you expect to make any money? Right now, your office is full of people who cannot spell, who cannot do long division, who do not know how to ship a box to Bolivia because they haven't a friggin' clue what a Bolivia is.
Wonderin why your wallet is gone and the punk in front of you is ready to shoot you? Try these statistics on for size: 40 percent of the U.S. Prison population is functionally illiterate. Gee, how'd they get that way ? From 1980 to 2000,states expenditures on education went up 32 percent. In that same period of time, states' spending on prison went up to 189 percent. Now that's smart thinking! And while the're in prison, are they making you money? No! The state is actually taking license plate work away from your coffers- You want those workers free so they can come to work in your prison!
Seventy-five percent of welfare recipients are illiterate. Don't you think things might be a little different if they could read and write? I don't mean different for them, I mean different for YOU- That's a lot of welfare mothers who could be slaving away for you and making you money if they weren't stuck in the prison of their illiteracy. Educate them well and you will reap the rewards.
It totally buggles my mind that conservatives haven't demanded , purely out of self-interest, that our schools prepare young people to contribute and even excel in the workplace. Workers are supposed to bring you great ideas and make you filthy rich- Instead they're sitting out there in their cubicles trying to figure out how to download the latest Weezer album. That's the result of all these years of chanting “leave no child behind” and demanding that your state keep testing kids with mandated exams. Teachers have stopped teaching anything useful and now teach for the test. Here's what it got you. A lot of kids who know how to beat a test but not much else. I've got a kid in my office right now who thought the U.K. Was Russia, had never heard the name “George McGovern,” and figured a legal pad was where you store legal court documents. And he's the smartest one in here! HELP!!!
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

You are never going to be rich

Listen friends, you have to face the truth: . The chance of that happening is about one in a million- Not only are you never going to be rich, but you are going to have to live the rest of your life busting your butt to pay cable bill and the music and art classes for your kid at the public school where they used to be free.
And it is only going to get worse. Whatever benefits you may have known are going to get whittled down to nothing- Forget about a pension, forget about Social Security, forget about your kids taking care of you when you get old because they are barely going to have the money to take care of themselves. And don't even think about taking a vacation, because odds are your job won't be there when you get back. You are expendable, you have no rights, and by the way, “whats a union?”
I know, many of you don't think it's that bleak. Sure. Times may be tough, but you think you'll survive. You'll be that one person who somehow escapes the madness- You are not going to give up the dream of some day having your slice of the pis. In fact some of you believe the whole pie might some day be yours.
I have some news for you: You are not even going to get to lick the plate. The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever. It's rigged so well that it dupes many otherwise decent, sensible, hard-working people into believing that it works for them, too- It holds the carrot so close to their faces that they can smell it. And by promising that one day they will be able to eat the carrot, the system drafts an army of consumers and taxpayers who gladly, passionately, fight for the rights of the rich, whether it means giving them billions in tax breaks while send their own children into dilapidated schools, or whether it means sending those children off to die in wars to protect the rich man's oil. Yes, that's right: The workers/consumers will even sacrifice the lives of their own flesh and blood if it means keeping the rich fat and happy because the rich have promised they can join them at the table.
But that day never comes, and by the time the working stiff has this figured out, he's in an old age home spewing a lot of bitter mumbo jumbo about authority and taking it out on the aide who is trying to empty his sorry bedpan.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

Osama by his rightful title multi-millionaire

I've always thought it was interesting that the mass murder of September 11 was allegedly committed by a multi-millionaire. We always say it was committed by a “terrorist” or by an “Islamic fundamentalist” or an “Arab”, but we never define Osama by his rightful title: multi-millionaire? Why have we never read a headline saying, “3,000 Killed by Multi-Millionaire”? It would be a correct headline , would it not ? No part of it is untrue _ Osama bin Laden has assets totaling at least $ 30 millions; he is a multimillionaire. So why didn't that become the reason for profiling potentials terrorists? Instead of rounding suspicious Arabs, why don't we say, “Oh my God, a multimillionaire killed 3,000 people! Round up the multimillionaires! Throw them all in jail! No charges! No trials! Deport the millionaires!!”
We need protection from our own multi-millionaires, corporate terrorists, the ones who rip off our old-age pensions, destroy the environment, deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit, deny us our right to universal health care, take people's jobs away whenever the mood hits them. What do you call a 19 percent increase in the homeless and the hungry from 2001 to 2002? Are these not acts of terrorism? Do they not cost lives? It is not all part of a calculated plan to inflict pain on the poor and the working poor, just so that a few rich men can get even richer?
We have our “terrorists” to deal with, and we need out entire focus returned to them so that we can one day live in a country where the people once again pick the president, a country where the wealthy learn that they have to pay for their actions. A free country, a safe country, a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we truly need to fear.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore