"It takes a child to raze a village."
- "Surly" Dylan Suttles
"To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks, he's a liar."
- Edward Abbey
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"The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation."
- Terence McKenna
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"If one is righteous, wrong, and ideologically fixated it becomes a one way trip to frothing lunacy that you will misattribute to everyone else going mad."
- El Gato Malo
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“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
- Thomas Paine
"I've spent my whole life sticking it to the man. If I do this, I'll be the man. I don't think I can be the man."
- Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson), Stargate SG-1
Now I'm going to have to binge the entire SG-1 series until I find the context in which Jack said that. :-)
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Now I'm going to have to binge the entire SG-1 series until I find the context in which Jack said that. :-)
Season 8, episode 2: "New Order, Part 2" (2004), in which newly-promoted Brigadier General O'Neill debates whether or not he'll take over command of the SGC.
Just as good as the quote itself was the response:
"Sir, if you don't take the position we will be stuck with someone much worse. That came out wrong, didn't it..."
- Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping)
"Now, I think what is going to happen in the future is that dictators will find, as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! But, if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in Brave New World, partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy."
- Aldous Huxley, in a 1958 interview with Mike Wallace
"At my feet were the remains of a camp fire, with blackened stones in a rough circle. Pieces of partially juniper littered the area, along with an ancient pull-tab aluminum soda can, and aluminum sardine can, and pieces of a plastic chlorine bleach bottle. Sounds like one hell of a lunch someone had there."
- David Rice, Desert Soliloquy: A Perfectly Sane Misanthrope Hides in the Desert (2017)
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"If you ever need to know who in the USA has no political power at all, just pay attention to who the media tells us to fear."
- David Rice, Desert Soliloquy: A Perfectly Sane Misanthrope Hides in the Desert (2017)
"How do I know you are who you say you are?" My brother asked. "Tell me something that only the two of us know."
"I am cursed by having an extraordinarily high intelligence, which I seldom use," I told my brother. "Often when my brain tells me to do something, I do the opposite." There was an extended silence. "Human civilization ended when the first unjust law was passed." There was more silence. "It is the nature of apples to fall out of trees. It is the nature of fools to sit under apple trees. Satan is an honorable profession: if no one stood up and accused, few wrongs would be righted. We need more smart people for the same reason we need smart people. When I see a beautiful sexy woman I think of hot buttered popcorn. The correct response to tyranny is sedition. I think humanity should go extinct for the sake of everyone else. When police officers are the problem, more crime is the solution. Disloyalty to government and authority is a sign of superior intelligence. When I die, I shall die a whole man, with the bark still on me," I told the silence.
"Jesus. A torrent of sexist Hippie Commie Zen Buddhist shit. It must be you."
- David Rice, Desert Soliloquy: A Perfectly Sane Misanthrope Hides in the Desert (2017)
"I am thinking that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, whether we know it or not, and that if we cast out its previous inhabitant - and the entire worldview that went along with it - we had better understand what we plan to replace it with. Someone, or something, is going to sit on that throne whether we know it or not."
- Paul Kingsnorth
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“I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown…”
-Nyarlathotep, H.P. Lovecraft
Evil seeks its like, its own reflection in its ministers it is indeed its prime imperfection that it is doomed to work with tools who[s temper is as unsound as its own ... the whole history of evil shows that it is only capable of working in fits and starts .. its vigour and judgement are unequal to the full intent of its designs.-Spence
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"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty."
― George Washington
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This bears a re-post here from over on Deep 6 FAWTL:
Don't you hate it when you accidentally say the wrong name during sex, and then your partner is all "Who the f!$~ is Imperator Caesar Nerva Traianus Divi Nervae Filius Augustus!?"?
"Authorities aren’t stupid. When they start smashing rules and throwing off constitutional restraints, they always start with someone unpopular. People as a result tend to shrug off the excesses in the moment, but it’s the world they wake up to ten years later that’s the problem."
- Matt Taibbi
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"[M]eaningful politics are impossible if it is prohibited to work with or even form friendships with those who think differently. In particular, there is no way to claim to represent the interests of the working class if you simultaneously declare the social and religious values of working-class people to be so grotesque and hateful that even friendly and respectful interactions, let alone political alliances, are prohibited."
"It's easy to put various flags and hashtags on your profile, or claim that you believe in political causes, or seek applause by publicly denouncing others as less enlightened than you. [...] Much more meaningful and valuable is what you do in life, how you treat others, the humanity you show. The things you do when no one is looking reflect much more on your values than the slogans you chant and the flags you wave for others."
- Glenn Greenwald
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"There is a Great Beast loose in the world of men. It awoke in dark times to fight a terrible enemy. It stormed through Europe, across the far Pacific, and crushed the evil that it found there underfoot. But when it was victorious, when the crooked cross and the rising sun were done with, the Great Beast's keepers found that it would not go back to sleep. The Beast has many heads, and on its heads are written names: Lockheed. Bell. Monsanto. Dow. Grumman. Colt. And many more. And they are very, very hungry."
- Garth Ennis, Punisher: Born (2003)
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"When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty."
- Chris Hedges
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"We live in a [time] period where we are civilized, but have forgotten why."
- anonymous commenter
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“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
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"I swear to god, [the United States] is nothing but three corporations in a trench coat."
- June Lapine
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"If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles,and having expectancies to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviours will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked. Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species' most complex behaviours, so does ideational generativity for man. Loss of these respective complex behaviours means death of the species."
- Dr. John B. Calhoun, Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population (1973)
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"My fear is that American politics has become "my sociopaths" versus "your sociopaths," with no questioning of the premise that sociopaths should be running things at all."
- Walter Kirn
“Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media.”
- Terence McKenna
Rich Evans: "I give them a C-minus for effort."
Tim Higgins: "Hey, C-minuses get degree-minuses."
- Best Of The Worst: Halloween 2022
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"When I worked in factories as a young man, on the line, doing the very same two-three manual actions over and over again, for hours each day; there are only a few things that I remember helping me get through it. One was the banter amongst the other fellows on the line, I remember it as being quite fun. I remember some of the crew as being quite clever. Here I am, nearly fifty years later, I still remember these fellows with affection. Now, that banter was not throughout the day. There were other parts of the day that the repetition seemed to hypnotize me. I believe that these spells were congruent with the others near me. Somewhat like a long automobile drive: wondrous thoughts and insights seemed to frequently occur to me during the activity. The factory sounds all faded in the background of my thoughts.
Even though that work may have minimalized my individuality in some ways, I do remember visiting furniture stores and having some pride in knowing that my pneumatic-driven nails and staples were a pretty important part of keeping people from falling to the floor from their chairs and sofas! I don't remember disliking my work at all. Of course, I was young and we all have different temperaments.
Now in this digital world, the experience is quite different. I don't have the camaraderie of live beings at each side and across from me. There isn't a similar pleasant reverie. I see there is more to naturally rebel against in our current environments and more constraint against rebellion. There is too little primal or familiar in the current environment. The factory line had at least some of that; enough, I think, to hold onto some sanity."
- YouTube commenter "Dan Locke"
“I almost feel like there are forces within our society that just want art to die.”
- Tim Robbins
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"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur."
- Dan Quayle
"Accessories are the window to a person's soul."
-Sparkle Cadet
"Moldy mildew, mother of mouthmuck, dangle and strangle and death!"
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"When you invent deranged fantasies about treasonous factions, you mostly end up creating them. [...] There’s a finite number of times you can throw people out of the village gates. Eventually you get a neighboring town packed with seething exiles."
- Matt Taibbi
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“All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”
- Woody Allen
Nanomachines!
-Senator Armstrong.