"Ah, banknotes. You know, I remember some damned fool telling me that they were not worth the paper they're written on. Well, if they were, they'd all be worth much the same, wouldn't they? And they're not."
- Nikolas "Lindybeige" Lloyd
"We all believe time-saving devices will save us time - but we never stop to think if this is actually true. If we did, the uncomfortable reality that would greet us is by and large, time-saving devices have increased our capacity to waste time rather than use it well."
- Hadden Turner
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"Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history[…] It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race."
- Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)
"The idea of limitless economic growth is based on the obsessive and fearful conviction that more is always needed. The growth is maintained by the consumers' panic-stricken suspicion, since they always want more, that they will never have enough."
- Wendell Berry
"Perhaps the hallmark trait of all sublimity and grandeur is a sense of changeability and extremism; like a strong Madeira or Scotch, a sublime thing, place, or experience presents those who possess it with both ecstasy and ruin at the same time. Perhaps the sense of ecstasy the thing exudes is actually heightened by the possibility of ruin; perhaps the seeker of sublime things wishes to fly to the sun, only a hair's width away from their own delirious and flaming demise."
- Andy Hickman
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"[The corporations] are structures in which, as my brother says, “the buck never stops”. The buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to the shareholders, who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere."
- Wendell Berry
"The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines."
- Wendell Berry
"Country music, like opera, should be sung only in Italian."
- John L. Chamberlain
"You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."
- Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
"A decent man was standing at a little distance and, seeing that I was a stranger, approached. I asked for what was the water of this well good. ‘Oh, Sir,’ said he, ‘it is good for everything, – the blind return walking, the lame speaking, and the deaf seeing. If you have any infirmities, just go round on your knees seven times and see what happens.’"
- Chevalier Jacques Louis de Bougrenet de La Tocnaye, A Frenchman's Walk Through Ireland (1796)
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"[T]he systemic tendencies of capitalism are proliferating through a network of people who have no ability to push pause to stop and ask if this is what they all really want. This is what ‘market forces’ are so good at doing: they prioritise a small subset of human desire - that momentary need to move slightly faster, for example - in order to lock in a new state of acceleration that you won’t be able to back away from."
- Brett Scott
"[W]henever a man by proclaiming his good deeds receives the recompense of fame, he diminishes in a measure the secret reward of a good conscience."
- Boethius
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"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't f~*$ them."
- attributed to John Waters
"The Watchmen movie is like listening to someone with a perfect memory and no sense of humor tell a joke they heard last night."
― "Cordelia Ceps", City of Heroes player
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"You know, I still remember the first time I got high. Back of my older brother's van. Know it musta been some good s~@$ too, because I'm an only child."
- Old Man Henderson
"In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. [...] Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse."
- Frédéric Bastiat
"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
-- Henry Hazlett, Economics In One Lesson
"I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too."
- Mitch Hedberg
Shiro's solution is to require that every new law or policy be vetted by gamers actively gaming and trying to out-compete each other.
There is no quicker way to find the exploits and failures in your policy.
"Adding a hook to a bad song gives you a bad song with a hook."
- unknown
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"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."
- E.B. White
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"You were such a misfit, you were so interesting and different… But nobody seems to remember being the bully, and I promise you that at some point in your life, you were also the bully. I certainly was. I couldn’t comprehend the senseless sadism of the kids who’d gang up on me, back when I was seven years old with dyspraxia and a speech impediment. What had I ever done to them? How could anyone bear to be so cruel? But somehow, all that stuff went out the window as soon as I encountered anyone lower down the totem pole than I was. My cruelty wasn’t senseless. Other people had been cruel to me, which made me a victim: anything I did was, by definition, fighting back, being brave. After all I’d been through, didn’t I deserve to experience the joys of power? Just a little? As a treat?"
- Sam Kriss
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"Working with creativity means that day in and day out, doors are slammed in your face. You pour heart and soul into something only to hear back ‘it’s not good enough’ or ‘no one cares.’ This would not be so bad if it was objective feedback about the quality of what you produce. You could go back to the drawing board and try harder. But again… meritocracy in the arts is an illusion. Anything you create buys you a lottery ticket. Winning or losing, though, has next to nothing to do with quality."
- Daniele Bolelli
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Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
Cave Johnson - Portal 2
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"...The dominant search engine cannot also be a major AI creator of information. The conflicts of interest of having these two functions in the same company are enormous and unavoidable. We must have search engines that function fully independently from information generators. If not, truth truly dies."
- “Make Orwell Fiction Again”, SubStack commenter
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Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day
You stuffed it underneath the floorboards with the rest of my corpse until the sound of my heartbeat intensified your descent into madness
"You heard it here folks, the shopping center has just been bombed by live turkeys. Film at 11."[/b]
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As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
-Arthur Carlson
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As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
-Arthur Carlson
"The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!"
William Roper (Corin Redgrave): "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield): "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
- A Man For All Seasons (1966)
"Don't mess with me, lady. I've been drinking with skeletons."
- Hellboy, The Island (2005) by Mike Mignola
It’s not the drinking with skeletons that’s bad. It’s the mopping up afterwards.
Alack the heavy day!
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
-Richard II Act IV, scene 1.
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"Why is it that we can no longer be ‘anti’ something without wanting to ban it? I’m anti many things: smoking, cycling, grime music, veganism, to name a few. I’ll argue against them all day after a few beers, but at no point do I ever feel I have the moral authority to ban anyone else from doing them."
- Brynjar Johansson
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"Today, new technologies can sweep through society so fast we have taken to calling them “disruptive”. Even the word, “disruptive”, has acquired a positive connotation, which is a bit like suggesting that frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are good for gardening."
- Peco Gaskovski
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Why is it that we can no longer be ‘anti’ something without wanting to ban it? I’m anti many things: smoking, cycling, grime music, veganism, to name a few. I’ll argue against them all day after a few beers, but at no point do I ever feel I have the moral authority to ban anyone else from doing them."
- Brynjar Johansson
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Why is it that we can no longer be ‘anti’ something without wanting to ban it? I’m anti many things: smoking, cycling, grime music, veganism, to name a few. I’ll argue against them all day after a few beers, but at no point do I ever feel I have the moral authority to ban anyone else from doing them."
- Brynjar Johansson
Pfft. It'll never catch on.
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
-Arthur Carlson
AFAIK, turkeys can fly.
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
-Arthur Carlson
AFAIK, turkeys can fly.
Wild turkeys can fly, though they aren't great at it, and they tend to make a racket when they do so. Domestic turkeys usually can't due to their increased weight.
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"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."
- E.B. White
"YANKEE (n): In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (see DAMNYANK)"
- Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)