“Quarrels never could last long / If on one side only lay the wrong.”
- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack
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Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson): "For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff."
Secretary of State (David Herman): "But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes."
Attorney General (Sara Rue): "So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops."
Joe Bauers: "Yes."
Attorney General: "Water. Like out the toilet?"
Joe Bauers: "Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea."
Secretary of State: "But Brawndo's got what plants crave."
Attorney General: "It's got electrolytes."
Joe Bauers: "Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow."
Secretary of Energy (Brendan Hill): "Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.
Secretary of State: "Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?"
Secretary of Defense (Anthony Campos): *laughs*
Joe Bauers: "Okay, look. You want to solve this problem. I want to get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?"
Attorney General: "Brawndo's got what plants crave."
Secretary of Energy: "Yeah, it's got electrolytes."
Joe Bauers: "What are electrolytes? Do you even know?"
Secretary of State: "It's what they use to make Brawndo!"
Joe Bauers: "Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?"
Secretary of Defense: "'Cause Brawndo's got electrolytes."
- Idiocracy (2006)
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"We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear."
- Nicholas Carr
"In Simulacra and Simulation, [Jean] Baudrillard suggested that we are living what he called a hyperreality. This is a world in which our signs and symbols, which proliferate through modern media, no longer reference back to something in the real world, only to other signs and symbols. As a result, we become trapped in a self-replicating simulation of reality. Nothing is real, and nothing feels authentic."
"If your deepest-held beliefs can be comfortably absorbed into Starbucks’ PR strategy, it may be time to go on a vision quest."
- Alexander Beiner
"With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations."
- Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (1967-70)
"Sometimes the fork in the road ahead asks you to choose between different routes to hell."
- Matt Taibbi
"It's an impossible decision. I'll just have to hope that when I flip the coin it somehow explodes and kills me."
- Bernard Black (Dylan Moran), Black Books (2002)
"The vortex of globalisation, of modernity itself, is widening and deepening daily, and into it all distinctions and differences are sucked, to emerge bleached, efficient and unloved on the far shore. Can countries as we have known them survive this? Can there be such a thing as a ‘national identity’ in the age of smartphones, shipping containers, mass media and mass migration, and do many people even care?"
- Paul Kingsnorth
"I wouldn't ever go out to hurt anybody deliberately. Unless it was, you know, important— like a league game or something."
- Dick Butkus
“Science supplies us with, instead of the concrete individual, the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. Apart from agglomerations of huge masses of people, in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance.”
- Carl Jung
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“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
- Thomas Jefferson
"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century."
- Hannah Arendt
"California is what happens when new money becomes old money. With no more endless frontier, the clean slate goes from a promised given to a thing offered to new settlers as a service, subject to regular review, by local boyars who’ve appointed themselves to set the price of indulgences. [Horace] Greeley would have called those rents, and would never have found fame writing about this version of the American West. “Turn around, young man” just doesn’t have the same ring."
- Matt Taibbi
"The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty."
"[T]he logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle."
"The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine is here to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug--that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes."
"In a healthy world, there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it."
"Put a pacifist to work in a bomb-factory and in two months he will be devising a new type of bomb"
- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
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"The tendency to analogize every current threat to the literate and modernist industrial totalitarianisms of the last century is a reflexive tic in our politics. But it has impaired our society’s ability to recognize different kinds of threats and new realities."
"Most “debate” on social media is merely a simulation: in reality, it is an agonistic ritual whose goal is not to persuade one’s opponent but to reaffirm one’s existing allegiances and demoralize the enemy, never to defend a political argument but always to defend the honor of the political tribe. Even where intellectual discourse does happen, it is not the content promoted by the algorithm since its dominant logic is tribalizing and insular."
- Michael Cuenco
"All confrontation is based on deception. This is called the strategy of tactical paradox.
When you are able to attack, you must seem unable.
When you are active, you should appear inactive.
When you are near, you should have the enemy believe you are far. And when far, near.
Bait the enemy.
Pretend to be disorganized, then strike.
If the enemy is secure, then be prepared.
If the enemy be of superior strength, then evade.
If your opponent has a weakness of temper, then strive to irritate.
Make a pretense of being weak and cultivate your opponent's arrogance.
If your opponent is at ease, then ensure that they are given no rest.
If the forces of your opponent are united, then seek to divide them.
Attack when the enemy is unprepared.
Appear when you are not expected.
The leader who wins makes careful plans."
- Paul F. Watson
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"We live in a rule-bound era of high vigilance. It’s a time of emergency measures and vast decrees, of curbs on expression, behavior, and even movement. They are portrayed as serving the common good and some people obey them in this spirit, others so they can be seen obeying them. Fun, with its little anarchies, is suspect. It’s regarded as selfish, wasteful, perhaps unsanitary."
- Walter Kirn
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"People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny"
"Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least."
"Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice."
- Edward Abbey
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"In modern conditions, risk-aversion and the fear that goes with it are a standing invitation to authoritarian government. If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong."
- Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption
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"He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
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"[A] lot of people are letting other people fight the fight on the logic that it’s not the right hill for them to die on. But at some point one runs out of hills. Principles are not like money. You do not need to be judicious and stingy about how you spend the capital of integrity. And who you spend it on. No. The more hills you die on the more valuable you become."
- Bari Weiss
"Never eat raw mushrooms! They have killed off many a large family."
- Kekaumenos, Strategikon (AD 1078)
"When they ask you what happened here, tell them… the North remembers. Tell them Winter came for House Frey." -- Arya Stark
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"Don't be part of the problem. Be all of it."
- anonymous
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"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
― H.L. Mencken
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"More than a full belly and a comfortable bed is needed for human flourishing, and men will often cast those things aside and risk disaster to stand on their own two feet."
- Darryl Cooper
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“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.”
- Ronald Wright
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"It's not voyeurism if you're supervising."
- Me
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"[T]he twentieth century continues to produce--at an always accelerating tempo--more history than it can consume. Korea is forgotten, and Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez are the new sensations; Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez slide into sudden oblivion, and we are all agog at Tibet and the Congo; Tibet and the Congo vanish before we have time to find them on the map (or to find a map that has them) and Cuba explodes; Cuba subsides to something combining a simmer and a snarl, and Vietnam and Rhodesia (or is it Southern Rhodesia?) seize us. Ghana, Guiana, Guinea. Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes, and dishes ever more exotic, before we are able to swallow (let alone digest) those that were just before us. Remember the "Lebanon crisis" of 1958, in which the United States was deeply involved? Of course not. Who would, these days? Who could? And why?"
- Milton Mayer
Cut me some slack, I can't remember where I was 24 hours ago, much less what someone else said six years ago.
"Just because you're proceeding in one direction doesn't make it progress."
- Tarl Warwick
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"We've been drugged with convenience. I thought it was bad when I was addicted to heroin! I didn't think that it would be convenience that killed me!"
- Russell Brand
"People say when they see my tattoos that I look like a melted crayon, so that’ s interesting."
- Ed Sheeran
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"Matt Taibbi: My take on that was that he looked like a band put out to warm up for Queensrÿche.
Walter Kirn: Last night, because I ran a joke on Twitter about the optics of this thing, I had people sending Black Sabbath videos… I put up a Blue Oyster Cult video. There was a lot of Rage Against the Machine. There was a German something…
Matt: I thought of Rammstein.
Walt: It was a techno band. The point is, no one on my Twitter feed at least thought it was a Joni Mitchell song, or, you know, uh, any, anything approaching folk or hippie music. It was all metal of one kind or another.
Matt: It was a song that Beavis and Butthead would’ve liked.
Walt: It’s Metal Joe now."
- just a couple of A&E-section journalists discussing celebrity metalheads
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"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
"Shut the f++~ up! Say Christ is lord."
- Shia LaBeouf