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"What happens to a society that doesn’t square its mental books when it comes to facts, truth, errors, propaganda and so on? There are only a few options. Some people will do what some of us in this room have done: grow frustrated and angry, mostly in private. Others have tried to protest by frantically cataloging the past.
Most however do what’s easiest for mental survival. They learn to forget. This means living in the present only. Whatever we’re freaking out about today, let’s all do it together. Then when things change tomorrow, let’s not pause to think about the change, let’s just freak out about that new thing.
We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory. It’s why people can’t read books anymore and why, when they see people [...] who don’t fit into obvious categories, they don’t know what to do except point and shriek, like extras in Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
- Matt Taibbi
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"Before you judge someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes."
― Frieda "Saying This Earned Me My 15 Minutes" Norris
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“If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.”
― Dale Carpenter
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“You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
"To the organisational mind, it is obvious that if something is a problem, then creating a unit or managerial post to address that problem will help. This is because the organisational mind belongs to the Machine, and when it looks at society it sees Lego bricks instead of leaves."
- Flat Caps and Fatalism
"Accusations of nostalgia often rest on an unspoken assumption that it would be terrible to have to live ‘like that’. Probably it would be for us. But if we lived like that, we would not be us."
- Flat Caps and Fatalism
"Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans."
- Nick Bostrom
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"The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call ‘nature’, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and that everything we do to it we also do to ourselves. Change the climate out there and it changes in here. Erode the soil, erode your soil. Poison the oceans, poison your culture. This is how it works, and this is what we are now facing.
And we cannot face it; even those of us who think we can. Whatever we think our politics are - and they are likely to be the least important thing about us - we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out - and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face - can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure."
- Paul Kingsnorth
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All I remember is giving someone the advice "Well, a good romance starts with good communication. A bad romance starts with Ra-ra ah-ah-ah, roma romama, gaga ooh la la."
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"To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution."
"Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection which could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is 'in principle' an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself."
- Leszek Kołakowski
"No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him."
- Aldous Huxley
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"(I)f an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic. Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc."
- Andrzej Łobaczewski
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“Under pretense of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, Paris, France, 16 Jan. 1787
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"go fucc thyself i saes, and let thy frenc freonds do the same"
- buccmaster of holland, The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth
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"[T]he world has always been a thing of unpredictable wonder and utter strangeness, but we stopped noticing it because we got too comfortable. Like a lover, who is really a strange and f#@&ing wonderfully unknowable person, but we stopped noticing all that. Then, suddenly, they do something we didn’t expect or predict, and we’re thrown off, confused, afraid they’ve changed, afraid they don’t love us."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
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"Capitol Hill is an assisted living facility for psychopaths. It’s where people who receive sexual gratification from dropping military explosives on civilians go to wait for the sweet embrace of death. The whole place smells like night terrors and urine."
― Caitlin Johnstone, the most powerful clairodorant in Australia
Clairodorant is apparently French, but I can't find a translation for it. :-(
Heh. Somehow that did not occur to me.
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"That idea, land as commodity, is what actually caused the birth of capitalism, and it’s why most people are renting s$!+ty tiny apartments in cities and buying packages of wilted salads at grocery stores.
Without land, you cannot grow your own food. Also, without land, you cannot build a home. Also, without land, you have absolutely no choice whatsoever except to sell your time and labor to someone else in exchange for money. You can then use that money to buy food, and pay rent, and to heat your apartment, but at every step you’ll always be giving your money away to others to do things your ancestors just a couple of generations back did for themselves."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
Accroche-toi à ton rêve
Accroche-toi à ton rêve
Quand tu vois ton bateau partir
Quand tu sens ton coeur se briser
Accroche-toi à ton rêve
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"The front line against corporate tyranny is not the ballot box. It is in the desperate struggle by the overworked and underpaid to prevent corporate behemoths from turning everyone into gig workers without health and retirement benefits, job security, sustainable incomes or equitable working conditions."
- Chris Hedges
… Don't turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar's in town, whoa oh oh
Don't turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar's in town, whoa oh oh
(Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?)
Don't turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar's in town, whoa oh oh
Don't turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar's in town, whoa oh oh
Don't turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar's in town, whoa oh oh
Don't turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar's in town, whoa oh oh
"Most of them were not simply evil, they were well aware that they are doing things which bring humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, instead of saying: "What horrible things I did to people!" the murderers would be able to say: "What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!"
- Slavoj Žižek, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt
"People look at Atlantic City and say, 'It was once a slum. Now it is a slum with casinos.'"
- Murray Raphel
"Reality — especially the “real” of material conditions and the inescapable need to eat — has a funny habit of crashing through all our fantasies that we are “better” than others. Consider how, after the economic crisis in Greece, many of the “upwardly mobile” new petite bourgeoisie suddenly found themselves facing extreme poverty. Many who thought they’d escaped the “backwards” agrarianism of their ancestors fled the cities and returned to their families’ derelict farms. The dazzling promise of Capital turned to dust, and they turned back to the earth."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
"Power only laughs at its own jokes."
- Chris Hedges
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“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”
"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself."
“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.
You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.”
"“Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue:
'No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.'"
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”
"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself."
“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.
You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.”"“Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue:
'No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.'"― Eleanor Roosevelt
When I see a set of quotes like that -- all wise and all well-spoken, I always wonder, "Are those really quotes from that person, or have additional quotes been attributed to them over time?"
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"I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.
“Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.
There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake."
- Father Daniel Berrigan
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"[W]hen somebody says it’s the end of history, I reach for my shield. When somebody says we’ve transcended the business cycle, I want to buy gold. And when somebody says we’ve sort of gone through this period of false consciousness and inferior being into a new totally transparent AI assisted, neuro-laced, healthy, sustainable future that is just an arrow ever upwards. [...] It’s always the first sign that a big tragedy is coming, that a castle’s going to fall, that a king is going to be revealed as a tyrant and be assassinated by his own people or something. "We’ve transcended the tragic, we’ve transcended our flaws. The boomerang effect has been erased and onward and upward." Look out below when people start talking like that."
- Walter Kirn
"The man enslaved to wealth can never be honest"
- Democritus of Abdera (attributed)
"Savor the fruit of life, my young friends. It has a sweet taste when it is fresh from the vine. But don't live too long. The taste turns bitter after a time."
- Kor (John Colicos), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
"Having a phone in your pocket is like always carrying around a glazed donut that constantly tempts you to snack on it—but if you do, you know it will ruin your appetite. Sure, the phone is a good way for people to get hold of you—just like smearing yourself with blood before you go swimming in shark-infested waters is a good way for sharks to reach you."
- Ruby LaRocca
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"The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record being played."
- George Orwell
"The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record being played."
- George Orwell
that is the perfect quote for the present.
very, very well done, Mr. Mallon.
"The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record being played."
- George Orwellthat is the perfect quote for the present.
very, very well done, Mr. Mallon.
Don't thank me, I just stole it from a blog post by Gurwinder Bhogal.
words are like torchlight -- they serve a vital purpose, and light another torch when the time comes. so i repeat myself: you have done well. and thank you.
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"The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane."
- Eric Fromm
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"O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him."
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
"A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness."
- Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
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“An organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits itself to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society’s continued need for its management."
- Clay Shirky
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
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"In Iowa, there’s a lot of love for the pizza served at Casey’s convenience store chain, especially their breakfast pizza. Honestly, I can’t figure out what’s special about it, but The Takeout has reported that pretty much all of Iowa’s best pizza comes from gas stations, which is maybe the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life."
- Brian VanHooker
"We seem trapped in a position where there appears to be two — and only two — competing narratives about what is happening. Each narrative is in turn part of a larger framework opposed to the other, two containers into which all thought and all political action must be assigned. Each presents itself as the diametric opposite of the other, and sees everything outside its boundaries as automatically the territory of its dangerous enemy. Shadows of each other, they are locked in a struggle for “the real” that pulls all the rest of us into their shouting matches."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
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"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality."
- Ursula K. Le Guin