Quotes

This is my quote file. I update it when it occurs to me. All quotes are the property of the person who wrote them. If they offend you, read no further.

Acting / Film

“Listen, what do you think your job is? To learn the words? The usher can do that. Your job is to say them for the first time. Each time.” - Mike Nichols (to a struggling actor)

“I’m not interested in a realistic look - not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.” - Martin Scorsese, 1976

“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” - Jean-Luc Godard

Existentialism

“There are two ways to get enough: One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” – G.K. Chesterton

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” – Dr Albert Bartlett

“They don’t grade fathers, but if your daughter’s a stripper, you fucked up.” – Chris Rock

“Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.” – Isaac Asimov

“Everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame, but twelve of those is a rectal exam.” – John Oliver, The Daily Show

“Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” – John Dickinson

“How many times do you have to get hit over the head before you figure out who’s hitting you?” – President Harry S. Truman

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.” Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.” So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”” – Howard Beale, Network

“Everybody here sells his time for money. It’s like taking a mortgage against your life.” – Dr Dick Solomon (3rd Rock from the Sun, “I Enjoy Being A Dick”)

“As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.” – Dick Cavett

“I am driven by two main philosophies, know more about the world than I did yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” – Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?” – Hunter S Thompson

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults, but what we really experience is a narrowing of imagination.” – David Lynch

“Humanity is a great idea … in theory. But we’re not quite there yet.” - Chris Viens

“Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.” – Dr Cornel West

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - E. F. Schumacher (from Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered)

“Normal is the average of deviance.” - Rita Mae Brown (from Venus Envy, 1993)

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” - George Orwell (from 1984)

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” - Stephen R. Covey (from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

“It is the divine comedy. We all root for the Devil when he is on our side and curse him when he is not.” - Chris Viens (on moral relativism and “Batman”)

“All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.” - Woody Allen (from Deconstructing Harry)

“As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.” - George Bernard Shaw (from Overruled, 1912)

“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” - Rudyard Kipling (from The Light That Failed, 1890)

“I’m killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.” - Bill Watterson

“We’re all, to one degree or another, products of the society in which we live. We’re all derivative, all remixes, all echoes of all that came before us.”

“Time is a zero sum game.”

“If the human race is ever to move forward, it will be in spite of, not because of, nostalgia.”

Healthcare

“Even if you don’t have health insurance in America, you get taken care of. That could be defined as universal health care.” – Tom Thompson, HHS Secretary, as quoted by Senator Tom Daschle as an example of politicians being out of touch with the realities of healthcare.

“Look, I’ve practiced — I’ve practiced for 10 years. My wife is still practicing. Never once did I have a Medicare bureaucrat tell me what I could or couldn’t do for a patient, but all the time we have bureaucrats from the insurance companies calling up and saying, ‘We’re not going to cover this, and we’re not going to pay for that, and we’re denying coverage of that.’” – Dr Howard Dean, explaining to Newt Gengrich and George Stephanopoulos that the current system of private insurance is more invasive to the doctor-patient relationship than a publically run health initiative on “This Week”, Aug 10, 2009

“Funny how all these people so concerned about passing on health care debts to children were no where to be found when we tried so hard to fill that hole in the iraqi desert with hundred dollar bills.” – rascalcat on crooksandliars

“With all of the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, young people are beginning to think that the allied powers defeated Nazi Germany because Germany had too much health care.” – Jim Hansen

“Why do you think insurance compnaies should take 20% off the top of every healthcare dollar when they don’t do anything to improve peoples health?” – “hippie1367″ on rawstory on what to say to Republican congresspeople who eschew the notion of a single payer healthcare system

Teh Interwebs

“Trolling Digg is like pissing in an ocean of piss.” – AC on slashdot

“Why do you think, they call them “human resources”? Because you don’t work with resources. You use them. And when you used them up, you throw away the empty shells.” – Hurricane78 on slashdot

“K5 has the atmosphere of a world after people find conclusive proof that God did exist once but is dead now. " – “Quantum Foam” on Kuro5hin

“And that is what is so great about the internet. It enables pompous blowhards to connect with other pompous blowhards in a vast circle jerk of pomposity.” – Bill Maher

“Think about it though, in the history of computing, what competitive advantage has Microsoft ever had? Nothing, except momentum, starting with momentum given to them by IBM. It has always been enough for them to make a cheap copy of someone else’s technology at a later date, making it ‘good enough.’ That is there only competitive advantage. And it’s worked amazingly well for them. So it is understandable that Balmer would think a product that does nothing other than what their competitors already do would give them a competitive advantage. It always has before.” – “phantomfive” on slashdot discussing Microsoft’s role as innovator in regards to an iPhone/Android mobile device competitor

Knowledge

“Epistemic paranoia is exhausting and paralyzing – the computational overhead is oppressive, never mind the existential anxiety. The ability to sustain delusional confidence seems to be necessary for daily functioning in this culture.” - “St. Rev” responding to Scott Alexander’s The Cowpox of Doubt

“And the more informed you are, the less arrogant and aggressive you are.” - Nelson Mandela, from an interview with Oprah Winfrey

“No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.” - Grant Allen

“If you don’t understand why something is happening, you can’t fix it. If you didn’t fix it, it ain’t fixed.” - Artur Bergman, “Full Stack Awareness”, Velocity Europe

“The first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think; what you think next defines who you are.” - Unknown

“Everything is a poison, nothing is a poison. It is the dose that makes the poison.” - Paracelsus

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” - Bill Nye

“Nothing stays around as long as an interim solution.” - Sique on slashdot

Money

“Money is the enemy of the thoughtfully good.”

Optimism

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” - James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion (1926)

Our Rights

“As has been observed, “terrorism” and “pedophilia” are the root passwords to the Constitution.” – Nimey (114278) on slashdot

“The law of the jungle is ‘eat or be eaten.’ The law of civilization is ‘define or be defined.’ " – Dr. Thomas Szasz

“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

Politics / Class

“I am not a dictator. I have only simplified democracy.” – Adolph Hitler (1936)

“What we have in America is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” – Gore Vidal

“Saying you’re patriotic is like saying you have a big cock. If you have to say it, chances are it isn’t true.” – Bill Maher

“To the Bush ‘one prayer’ health care system: Oh lord I hope I don’t get sick cause I all I got is shitty HMO insurance and they’d just as soon let me die to save money on ink for their [CLAIM REJECTED] stamps.” – “FilthyHarry” on crooksandliars.com

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag & carrying a cross.” – Sinclair Lewis, author of “It Can’t Happen Here”

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” – Howard Zinn

“low wages are the problem, not the solution. " – “Samson-” on crooksandliars.com in regards to the financial crisis in 2008

“Sarah Palin is proof that there is no glass ceiling for women, as long as you’re not ugly, have fufilled your reproductive obligations, don’t have any actual power, will be subordinate to a man, seem clueless, and hiring you will keep a black man out of the white house.” – philspear (1142299) on slashdot

“[In regards to the TARP bailout,] Too little too late as far as I’m concerned. Some how, the Wolf convinced the Farmer to give him the keys to the hen house. Now the Farmer acts surprised when all of his chickens are eaten and asks him all kinds of naive questions like: ‘I trusted you with my chickens, Mr. Wolf, why did you let all your friends in to eat my chickens?’ Stupid Congress is Stupid.” – “Zabphelia” on crooksandliars.com

“Republicans, once hailed as the party of ideas, have become the party of stupid.” – Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 2008

“If God ever decides to give the world an enema, I’m pretty sure Wall Street is where He’ll stick the hose.” – Tom B, blogger

“Yo, everybody gonna get sick someday / But nobody knows how they gonna pay / Health care, managed care, HMOs / Ain’t gonna work, no sir, not those / ‘Cause the thing that’s the same in every one of these / Is these motherfuckers there, the insurance companies! / You can call it single-payer or Canadian way / Only socialized medicine will ever save the day! Come on now, lemme hear that dirty word – socialism!” – Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, Bulworth (1998)

“Just remember… GOP policy can be summarized as: 1. Cut taxes 2. Fuck you.” – aslan from crooksandliars

“It’s easy to see conservatives as stupid – because they are – but the problem goes much deeper than that. Conservatism is essentially creationism extended into every aspect of the physical world – a worldview that is to every degree and in every respect based upon wholly fictional, consciously created and then internalized bullshit that makes it possible to hold the delusional positions you want to hold without recognizing your own contradictions, and make the heartless and vicious decisions you want to make without feeling guilty. It is a manufactured view of the world that exists only for the purpose of obtaining some superficial credibility for the utter nonsense that has otherwise been adopted for self-interested reasons. In the same sense that hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, tortured logic is the compliment that conservatism pays to reality. (Recall that the Bush Administration’s name for liberals was ‘the reality-based community’.)” – KTK from “lean left” ( http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2009/08/28/8506/ )

“In a country where Velveeta™ is considered ‘cheese’, and ‘Marketing’ is an academic discipline and a university major, is it any surprise that this toxic stew is considered ‘politics’?” – “Davis X Machina” on Balloon Juice, on Mike Huckabee using Senator Edward Kennedy’s death to try to go against the Senator’s lifelong dream of universal healthcare

“I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” – Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, on the claims by Republicans after the 2008 election of Barack Obama that America was descending into “tyranny”

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” – Jay Gould, US financier & railroad businessman / robber baron (1836 – 1892)

“Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can’t write, intended for an audience that doesn’t read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn’t think. God is dead.” – “gin and tacos on right-wing pinup Sarah Palin’s autobiographical book “Going Rogue”

“When did ‘Commie’ start to fall out of use? Probably when Republicans started being from ‘Red’ states.” – Ronald Noon

“We allowed the SCOTUS to determine an election. We allowed war to be waged based on a lie. We allowed the SUPPOSED “most dangerous man in the world” to escape unscathed from the supposed ‘most powerful country on the planet’. We allowed our economy to be undermined by capitalist thieves. We allowed labor to be destroyed. We allowed our healthcare system to be prostituted and undermined. We allowed our legal system to be prostituted and undermined. We allowed our media to be prostituted and undermined. We allowed religion to inject itself overtly into our politics. We allowed outright racism and bigotry to go unchallenged and unpunished. We allowed outright treason to go unchallenged and unpunished. What are we to reclaim? We don’t care. Slience is acceptance, and the American people are silent.” – Liberal AND Proud on crooksandliars

(In response to “I think going back to Glass-Steagall would be like going back to the Walkman.”) : “But hey, you’d go back to your Walkman too, if everytime you put your iPod on shuffle, it blew up the goddamned planet.” – Jason Linkins from Huffington Post

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.” – Carroll Quigley

“The big problem with using the banking system as the conduit for monetary policy is that we have a failed banking system which lost all their money in the great casino which is run by people who only know how to make money at the great casino. It’s no longer a lending channel, it’s a gambling channel.” – Atrios in Helicopter Drop

“The most frustrating aspect of modern political life is the fact that the American public has internalized the (false) idea that magical self-made rich supermen don’t owe anything to the society that nurtured them because they’ve earned every dime of their fortunes all by themselves without any help from the government. The reality, of course, is just the opposite.” – Brad Reed on Crooks and Liars

“All government suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” – Frank Herbert

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.” - George Monbiot, from The Self-Attribution Fallacy

“When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.” - Mark Twain

“La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.” (Translated: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”) - Anatole France (Le Lys Rouge, 1894)

“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” - Noam Chomsky (source video)

“The dubious beauty of partisan politics is that for partisans, the people are almost interchangeable, and they’ll hold their nose and vote for anyone - as long as the candidate they’ve been told to fear doesn’t win.” - “penguinisto” on slashdot

Racism, Bigotry and the Team Mentality

“Slavery is slavery no matter how nicely the master treats you.” – nada from crooksandliars

“there’s idiot bigots in every race and culture .. though … it does seem that us white folk have it down to a science.” – “liberalINmoderation” on crooksandliars.com

“It’s this creepily worshipful, breathtakingly infantile abdication of intellect to a blatantly dishonest hypocrite that makes Limbaugh’s audience so goddamn sad and pathetic. These useless, insecure, failures of men look to Rush as the champion of their impotent rage, helping them to externalize responsibility for their own deficiencies, pinning the blame on those darn liberals and their racial and gender equality. And, sadly, they vote.” – “Carl Gordon” on crooksandliars.com

“NEWS FLASH – WHAT PASSED FOR SOME FANTASY CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM IS D E A D. Why? Because somewhere along the way our elected officials and a good portion of our countrymen and women convinced themselves that caring about each other is a sign of weakness.” – BlueSam on crooksandliars.com

“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.” – Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

“Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.” – Charles Hedges on alternet

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr

“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” - Martin Luther King, Jr (from “The Other America”, speech at Grosse Pointe High School on March 14, 1968)

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it … " - George Bernard Shaw (from The World, November 15, 1893)

“Wow, it’s almost like job growth is a side effect of capitalism, and not an end goal, and those who own the capital give out scraps with the utmost reluctance to the laborers that are necessary for them to grow said capital. If only there had been two hundred years of modern economic study to realize this.” - Johnny Wright

Religion

“Christians and other faiths have long tolerated violence in the name of ‘god’ and the extremists in their midst. You, and anybody who calls themselves ‘Christian’ own this as much as the Saudi royal family own the attacks of September 11, 2001. Maybe you have not particiapted in atrocity but neither have I heard a loud voice condemning this sort of behavior from Christians, until after the fact. In the end, it is a superstition that historically has killed far more people than it has saved and that’s just a fact.” – Margaret on crooksandliars.

“Personally it’s not God I dislike, it’s his fan club I can’t stand.” – Anonymous

“Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois: Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l’avons ordonné; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l’ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur. Une faculté de votre âme étant une fois tyrannisée, toutes les autres facultés doivent l’être également. Et c’est là ce qui a produit tous les crimes religieux dont la terre a été inondée.” (Translated: “Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.”) – Voltaire

“If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I find it truly stunning how many people can shrug off stuff like this, preferring instead a tiny, cramped cosmos just 6,000 years old, scheduled to end any-time-now in a scripted stage show of unfathomable violence and cruelty. An ancient and immense and ongoing cosmos is so vastly more dramatic and worthy of a majestic Creator. Our brains, capable of exploring His universe, picking up His tools and doing His work, seem destined for much greater tasks than cowering in a small groups of the elect, praying that some of our neighbors will go to perdition…” - David Brin, commenting on the discovery of Homo floresiensis

Society

“I lay this all at the feet of MY generation. The so-called ‘baby boom’, free love, anti establishment generation…who became the most narcissistic, consumerist, pro establishment generation in the history of our country. They grew fat and happy on the hard work of their parents and grandparents…who fought the wars, got their heads broken to create worker rights and sacrificed themselves to lay the groundwork for the creation of the middle class. This generation disgusts me. They truly do. And they DESERVE everything that happens to them. They failed their children…they failed the country.” – “liberalANDproud” on crooksandliars.com, talking about the failure of the United States to provide healthcare for its citizens

“Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population — to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff.” – Noam Chomsky

“How very odd. [quoting] Mackey began his piece with a quote from Margaret Thatcher - ‘The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’ [/quoting] That’s precisely the same problem with capitalism. Just ask Wall Street. Reminds me of the comic in East Berlin during the Cold War that was jailed for this joke: ‘I’m here to explain the difference between communism and capitalism; in capitalism, man oppresses man, whereas in communism it’s completely the opposite.’” – “Escher Sketch” on agonist.org, regarding the CEO of Whole Foods, Inc implying that healthcare for all is socialism, and that the poor people are fine spending “his money”

“Not in riches does our happiness consist, but in our natural needs. For in our needs there is also love; love does not pursue riches, riches defraud the fellow man. But this is against God, and the blessed life becomes worm-eaten. If the patient gives you, physician, what you need and nothing more, then you are both blessed. If you give him health, which is his need, and nothing more, then you are both blessed. … Let them give you as much as you need, but no riches; riches would bring you only damnation, but poverty will bring you blessedness. For our kingdom is not of this world, but of the life everlasting. Without the rich, nothing can be accomplished in behalf of the poor; the rich are bound to the poor as by a chain. … You, rich men, learn to know this chain, for if you ever break one link of it, you will not only by breaking the chain, but you yourselves will be cast aside like the broken link. Why do you make yourselves free from the poor and deny them your help? Just as by taking a few links from a chain, you would be making it too short, so without the poor, your path will be too short to lead to Heaven, and you will never attain to the goal that lies at the end of the chain.” – Paracelsus

“In a world where a billion workers cannot find a decent job or any employment at all, it bears stating the obvious: We cannot by any means — monetarily, governmentally or charitably — create a sense of value and dignity in people’s lives when we are simultaneously creating a society that clearly has no need for them.” – Paul Hawken, from “Natural Capitalism Creating Industrial Revolution”

“And there lies the “genius” of capitalism — as a rip off at least it is rather clever. At some point the people who came up with the system, figured out how to convince people that an abstract concept such as capital/credit is “worth” more than actual real assets and labor. It is a singularity in human evolution. Capital makes sense as a tool to agilize the exchange of labor and assets. Alas, when things like “credit” and “interest” enter the fray, capital becomes the end not the means. Imagine for example, that every time you talk to someone you are forced to transfer some of your wealth to those who have a monopoly in language for some reason. It sounds silly, but at a basic level that is exactly what financial systems and banks work just like.” – “ixnay” on crooksandliars.com, on Ben Bernanke saying that the economy is recovering, but only the market

“The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.” – Pearl Buck

“I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.” – Reuben Blades

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“I don’t mind younger people playing on my lawn. I detest them acting like they planted the fucking thing.” - Jace Paul

“Humankind doesn’t scale very well.”

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.” - Tom Waits

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.” - J.K. Galbraith

“We spend much of our adult lives belonging to clubs to which we secretly believe we are not worthy of belonging.”

“A pox on all those who tear down the old merely to make way for something new.” - Stan Rogers, Canadian songwriter (forward from Songs from Fogarty’s Cove)

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - John Steinbeck

“It is the way one treats his inferiors more than the way he treats his equals which reveals one’s real character.” - Charles Bayard Miliken

Stupidity

“You can stop eating to lose weight, but you’d have to stop breathing to lose stupid” – Anonymous Coward on slashdot

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

“The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” – Albert Einstein

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” – Hanlon’s Razor

“The problem is, you literally can’t fix stupid. When it comes to combating stupid, smart simply can’t comprehend it, can’t deploy a strategy against it. Smart can only try to explain the facts or educate the audience – but if they’re up against a case of the stupids, the best you can hope for is a small percentage of people understanding.” – “shadowgm” on crooksandliars

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” – Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821)

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” – George Carlin

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” – Isaac Asimov

“Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” - Samuel Clemens

“There is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

“A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.” - George Bernard Shaw, from “Maxims for Revolutionists” (1903) (This quote is usually butchered to change its meaning.)

“There are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And then there are unknown knowns. That is to say, things that you think you know; that it turns out you did not.” - Donald Rumsfeld, attempting to justify the false intelligence that was instrumental in instigating a second war in Iraq

“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” - Rick Cook, in The Wizardry Compiled (1989)

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” - Thomas Paine, “The American Crisis” (1776–1783)

War / Military / Terrorism

“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” – General George S. Patton

“I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own — and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the “haves” refuse to share with the “have-nots” by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.” – General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63, recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor

“It’s obviously disturbing to hear torture still referred to by the president as a ‘technique.’ That’s like saying bank robbery is a ’technique’ for withdrawing money from a bank. It’s not a ‘technique’, it’s a crime …” – Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor

“Soldiers, by and large, are tools used to advance the interests of those who own and run the country. They are lied to, conned and conditioned to believe they are fighting for ‘freedom’ when in most cases they are killing, dying and being maimed to enrich domestic elites and their allies/business partners. This is a big hard truth to swallow, which is why a lot of military personnel, and many vets, prefer the standard story. Recently, I caught on radio a reporter just back from Iraq, and he addressed this very issue. Many of the soldiers he spoke to were upset that what was said to them by recruiters and officers did not hold up in Iraq. The con job was cracking. But instead of exploring why this was so, many of these disgruntled soldiers further retreated into a black & white world, where they are on the side of Good and anyone opposing them is Bad. This is understandable on a basic human level — nobody likes to be lied to or made a chump. But it’s also dishonest and potentially destructive, both to the soldier and the society at large. The Soldier Mantra cited above is an authoritarian appeal and an intellectual and historical dodge. You don’t honor the troops by reducing them to stereotypes, however seemingly attractive.” – Dennis Perrin from “Red State Son”

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” – Albert Einstein

“War is insane. It isn’t hell; it’s a planned, coordinated communal psychosis.” – “E.R. Bills”‘s article on medicating military personnel for PTSD

“… [W]ar is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; that it multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” - Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to Sir John Sinclair)

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.” - George Orwell, “1984”

“b”

“I was in Las Vegas recently, and the entire strip was full of fullscreen content stretched to fit widescreens. It seemed like a little metaphor for Las Vegas, really” - rkanodia on slashdot

“More money is currently spent on research into skin treatments, breast augmentation, and penile enlargement/enhancement treatments, than neurodegenerative disease (like alzheimer’s) treatments. In other words, in 20 years’ time the world is going to be full of 80-year-old people with firm skin, perky tits, big throbbing erections, and absolutely no fucking memory of what to do with them.” – Moryath on slashdot

“I can’t find boots high enough to go into Twitter anymore.” - nines09 on Little Green Footballs

“A man doesn’t need a women who thinks he’s amazing – he needs one who can see him in all the ways he is not, to help him become a better person.”

“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” - Martin LeBlanc