"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
Winston Churchill
"Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about."
Mark Twain
“Police are to control your people through laws. The military is to control your enemies. When the military becomes the police, your own people become the enemy. That never ends well.”
“The next time someone says ‘Not everything's about you’ ask yourself the last time they allowed ANYTHING to be about you. If you can't think of a single time... it's a tactic to shut you up and make everything about them.”
Nicole Filippone @sensorystories.bsky.social
“Life hack: there is no way to make people love you by bombing them, and if they did love you bombing them will fix that.
Because, you see, there's no such thing as an attack on someone's life so legitimate that they say ‘yes, I had that coming, thank you, father.’”
@pymundgeneology.com
“I have this private schema that I have never offered up for scrutiny that biology is information contained in life, culture is information created by life, and technology is information contained in things created by life.”
Hank Green
“Socrates said, ‘The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.’ He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”
Chuck Palahniuk
“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), Essay, XIII: Freedom in Society, p. 103
“Hey Trump voters! Yesterday Trump had a press conference in the Oval Office. He said, ‘You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff-based. We had no income tax. Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let's charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country. And the country was never relatively—was never that kind of wealth. We had so much wealth, we didn't know what to do with our money. We had meetings. We had committees. And these committees worked tirelessly to study one subject. We have so much money. What are we going to do with it? Who are we going to give it to?’
Did you know that you know an actual expert on the period of 1870 to 1913?
It's me. I am.
I've been studying this time period for two decades and I don't mean reading a Doris Kearns Goodwin book every few months. I am a trained scholar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
There's a lot of us actually who study this period. In fact, I was in a room with many of them over the weekend. We stared at Trump Tower in Chicago while we met. It was... motivating.
Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost singlehandedly controlled the nation money's supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability.
There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905 there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8 hour work day.
Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity law, obsessing about sex and white women's purity. Creating instability in the Phillipines, the Carribbean and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women's suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled-down on segregation law and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.
Sound familiar?”
Lauren Thompson
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
George Washington
“The world is sick & yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters & filmmakers & songwriters, the beauty-makers, wading through the blood & muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.”
Nick Cave
