"And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. ... When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."
- George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier (1937)
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"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology."
- Edward O. Wilson
“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”
- Daniel Davies
"Things only get worse, they never get better. So, if they're the same, that's OK."
- Rich Evans
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“Law is more than the words that put it on the books; law is more than any decisions that may be made from it; law is more than the particular code of it stated at any one time or in any one place or nation; more than any man, lawyer or judge, sheriff or jailer, who may represent it. True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind. None of man's temples, none of his religions, none of his weapons, his tools, his arts his sciences, nothing else he has grown to, is so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident
"And one parking violation."
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"[T]hose who view the world through a prism bereft of principles — either due to lack of intellectual capacity or ethics or both — assume everyone's world view is similarly craven. It is this same stunted mindset that saddles our discourse with so much illogic and so many twisted presumptions, such as the inability to distinguish between defending someone's right to express a particular opinion and agreement with that opinion."
- Glenn Greenwald
"Man so craves to bear witness to power that, if necessary, he will even consent to having it inflicted upon himself."
- Darryl Cooper
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“We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. [...] The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.”
- William S. Burroughs
"We suffer from an addictive weakness for large illusions. A weakness for ideology. Power in our civilization is repeatedly tied to the pursuit of all-inclusive truths and utopias. At the time of each obsession we are incapable of recognizing our attitude as either a flight from reality or an embracing of ideology. The unshakable belief that we are on the trail to truth - and therefore to the solution to our problems - prevents us from identifying this obsession as an ideology."
- John Ralston Saul
Shad: "Do you know why they call it sea salt?"
Oz: "Because it's... no, I don't, actually."
Shad: "You see it! I see salt!"
Oz: "I'm about to commit assault."
- Shadiversity, What would a medieval adventurer eat?
"In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience."
- Matt Taibbi
"The public needs a greater understanding that in a crisis, not all the barbarians are outside the walls."
- Robert Higgs
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"A stunted soul can more easily be reduced to an acquiescent dullness than a vital, growing one can; there is no readier way to reduce a people to servile imbecility than to cut them off from the traditions of their language[.]"
- Michael Knox Beran
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"There are some words I've known since I was a schoolboy: "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged."
- Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 4, episode 21: "The Drumhead" (1991)
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“So in the end — this is the beauty of our current political environment — everybody has somebody else to blame, and nobody is responsible. American leadership has come a long way since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, who, on the eve of D-Day, wrote a short, plainly worded letter, to be published if the invasion failed, in which he said that the blame was his alone.
What a loser.”
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"When one door closes, another one opens. Other than that, it's a pretty good car."
- Chris Pratt
"They can't break you if you don't have a spine."
- Wally, Scott Adams's Dilbert
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."
- H.L. Mencken
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"Acceptance feels good, which is why so many in our species are addicted to seeking it, but if one prioritizes acceptance over standards, they eventually end up with no logically consistent standards whatsoever. Seeking to logically identify proper standards first, and challenging yourself to live up to them, should come before seeking acceptance."
- Jay Hubbard
"When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like an egg."
- Shamus Young
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago,
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girls’ bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
- George Orwell, A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been (published 1935)
"Walt Whitman taught us that we all contain multitudes, but these are times which want to whittle those multitudes away until we are all just one singular, angry person, convinced of our own Correctness, screaming across no-man’s-land at all of the Bad People in the other trench. Soon, if we are not very careful, we will stop screaming and start throwing grenades. None of us can only be one voice, or we will go mad. Perhaps this is the plan for us all in the end."
- Paul Kingsnorth
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"After The Matrix, I cannot wear sunglasses. As soon as I put them on, people recognize me."
- Carrie-Anne Moss
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
- Mike Tyson
"Freedom, Truth, Honor — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other."
- Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary (written circa 1960, published 1998)
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“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
- Albert Maysles
A joke to lighten the mood:
A Yorkshireman walks into a veterinarian's office. "Summat up wi' t'cat," says the Yorkshireman. "Is it a tom?" asks the veterinarian. The Yorkshireman gives him a puzzled look. "Nah, it's 'ere, int basket."
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Cdr. William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes): "Looks like the poor devil died in his sleep."
Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn): "What a terrible way to die."
- Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 2, episode 12 "The Royale" (1989)
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"The immaterialists have made a crucial and devastating category error with their rush to contrive a patentable reality. All we really wanted was hamburger and a cold drink and a smile from our date. They are giving us virtual Xanadu and a picture of a burger."
- Walter Kirn
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"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education."
"Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better."
"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan."
"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
"We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
― Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Sunny the beholder: "They're on our side, and this is all a big misunderstanding! Isn't that great news?"
Serini Toormuck: "Ugh, Sunny, why do you have to be so trusting?"
Sunny the beholder: "But... you raised me to be trusting."
Serini Toormuck: "I didn't expect you to trust me on it! Do as I imply, not as I say or do!"
- Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick
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“The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”
- Robert A. Heinlein
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“The risks have not just existed for a day, and they have not become bigger. The only thing that has become bigger is the hype around them...
...Now it is not our country that is being actively attacked, but your nerves, so that you have a constant feeling of panic...
...To the media: Be methods of mass information and not mass hysteria.”
― Volodymyr Zelenskyy
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"When you look at the world, the various arts have been tailored to be items for sale. Likewise, a person thinks of himself as something to be sold and even the implements of these Ways are proffered as merchandise. This mentality divides the flower and fruit into two, and makes much less of the fruit than the flower."
― Miyamoto Musashi, "The Scroll of Earth", The Book of Five Rings
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"All Draculas are Vampires, but not all Vampires are Draculas."
Actually, that'd be Northernlion or Ryan Letourneau who does a variety streaming on twitch, he's a bit of an older fella, Canadian, and has carved a niche as a sort of reasonably intelligent and kind content creator and is content to be considered old by his peers and audience. Not many here might be into steamer content but he has some quite entertaining banter that I find I can often actually relate to as a millennial and father who games and works from home while needing SOMETHING on in the background when I've already exhausted Netflix 5x over as background noise filler.
"You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour."
- Miyamoto Musashi, 20th precept of Dokkōdō
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“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
- Hannah Arendt
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“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
- George Carlin
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"If you know only your own position, you do not know it as well as you would if you knew your opponent’s position."
- Michael Shermer
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"Differentiation is the lethal enemy of the bureaucrat."
- Bret Swanson