no. 449

unknown

no. 448

Which explains why really getting something right seems like such an awesome victory.

no. 447

"It's weird, they're words, but you're lining them up stupid."

Skull, in Corporate Skull

no. 446

"You boffed him so hard, he went Walden."

Amy to Shelley, in John Allison's Bobbins.

no. 445

"We’re haunted by terrible fears and paranoias. We’re frightened beings. When people are afraid, fear takes over and brings out all kind of irrationality. So, yes, we’re constantly striving to be rational, but we’re not wholly rational beings."

Karen Armstrong

no. 444

"We’ve separated religion and politics, and this was a great innovation. But so deeply embedded in our consciousness is the desire to give our lives some meaning and significance that no sooner did we do this than we infused the new nation-state with a sort of quasi-religious fervor. If you regard the sacred as something for which we are willing to give our lives, in some senses the nation has replaced God, because it’s now not acceptable to die for religion, but it is admirable to die for your country."

Karen Armstrong

no. 443

no. 442

"I would respect postmodernism if it called itself mad humanities"

Zach Wiener in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (bonus button)

no. 441

"First rule of superlatives, there have to be at least two participants."

from Ty Halley's comic "Jerk-Off"

no. 440

no. 439

from Extra Fabulous Comics

no. 438

go see Zen Pencils, it's a much better quote source than here.

no. 437

George Carlin, from the film Life is Worth Losing

Cartoon by Gavin Aung Than, of Zen Pencils, a wonderful site that matches Gavin's drawings with wonderful quotes, and which beats hell out of my puny efforts here.

no. 436

"You know that dream where you suddenly realize that your forgot to go to class all semester?

That's how I feel every time I remember I'm an adult."

from the comic Calm Blue Oceans, by Jesse Cline

no. 435

"Never be haughty to the humble or humble to the haughty."

Jefferson Davis

no. 434

no. 433

"There are three sides to every story -- yours, mine, and the truth."

An American Proverb

no. 432

no. 431

"In general, good decisions are made when the person making the decision shares in both the benefits and the consequences of that decision. Shield a person from either and you shift the decision making process."

Condensed from the book "Why Flip A Coin? The Art And Science Of Good Decisions" by H.W. Lewis, and presented in the comic Free Fall by Mark Stanley.

no. 430

"Literary theory is a type of performance art!"

from Zach Weiner's comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

no. 429

If you were to shuffle a deck of cards and draw out ten cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what the cards are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of ten cards. The meaning is a human construct.

David McRaney, discussing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in his book, You Are Not So Smart (p42)


Hey, you want to see the truth of this first hand? Play poker, but make the worst hands the winners.

no. 428

Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter - These people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing worldviews. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn't, you hate them. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

David McRaney, discussing confirmation bias in his book, You Are Not So Smart (p28)

no. 427

Remember, there's always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to to advertisers by offering a guaranteed supply of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are that audience. In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart, p. 31

no. 426

"Well coffee can't be trusted, you know that right?"

Shep, in the comic Road Apples Almanac

no. 425

"If you think that selfishness and cruelty are fantastic personal traits, you might be a libertarian. In the movement no one will ever call you an asshole, but rather, say you believe in radical individualism."

Edwin Lyngar, Why I fled libertarianism — and became a liberal

no. 424

"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

W.T. Shedd

no. 423

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Frederick Douglas

no. 422

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.

Senator James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina plantation owner, in a senate floor speech from 1858 (a statement made pre-civil war, obviously).

Tell me, just how different is this idea from the idea currently being used to justify our current level of income inequality; that the rich somehow "deserve" their wealth while the poor "deserve" their poverty.

no. 421

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956


Or as my friend Mark Davis put it, "Silence is to injustice what oxygen is to fire."

no. 420

"Not seeing things as the are" is the field where the other causes of suffering germinate.

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, ca. 200 BC

no. 419

Vickram beamed at me. "Oh yes, madame. I am always happy. It is like this: What happens to us in life is for God to decide. But whether to be happy or not - that is our choice."

Anne Cushman, from Enlightenment For Idiots, p. 67

no. 418

"Euphemism is the opposite of swearing. Swearwords work because they carry an emotional charge derived from their direct reference to taboo objects, orifices, and actions. Euphemisms exist to cover up those same taboos, to disguise or erase the things that prompt such strong feelings."

Melissa Mohr, Holy Shit, p.197

no. 417

via


If I had been paying attention, I would have made this quote number 420. That folks, is poor planning.

no. 416

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin

no. 415

no. 414

"I find it interesting that while destroying the NEA seems to be one foundations of education “reform”, no one has suggesting destroying the AMA for healthcare reform."

Jake the snake commenting at Balloon Juice.

no. 413

This man, whom I once thought of as a romantic hero--a brave shining white knight, or the dark knight as he said. He’s not a hero, he’s a man with serious, deep emotional flaws, and he’s dragging me into the dark. Can I not guide him into the light?

"That pretty much sums up everything that's wrong here. This love conquers all bullshit that so much of modern pop culture seems to be built around. You can't change a man into a better person by just staying in an abusive relationship: staying in the relationship is just positive reinforcement of his abusive tendencies. The idea that we should glorify an abusive relationship into a romantic one is just fucked up and wrong."

Samurai Frog, from one of his in-depth, chapter-by-chapter dissections of "50 Shades Of Grey"

no. 412

Conservative, n - A person who believes that the poor are to blame for their problems while his own problems are the fault of the government.

Gin And Tacos

no. 411

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...

T. S. Eliot



It's also my birthday month

no. 410

“Plot idea: 97% of the world’s scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.”

Scott Westerfeld

no. 409

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

no. 408

"If you still dream about having a Rolex when you turn 50, your life failure".

Boulet, responding to French publicist Jaques Seguela, who said "If you dont own a Rolex when you turn 50, your life is a failure", while defending the purchase of a 13,000 Euro Rolex by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

no. 407

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

Sun Tzu

no. 406

"But all forms of prejudice are based on the same principle: you pre-judge somebody based on one most likely irrelevant fact, and you refuse to change your opinion based on actual, observable fact. It's the opposite of rational, liberal-minded thinking—and we don't mean liberal in any political sense. We mean liberal in the way Austen (and other writers of her time) used it: open-minded, willing to change your ideas, and interested in facts rather than opinions. You know—exactly the opposite of prejudiced."

from a Shmoop discussion of Pride And Prejudice

no. 405

no. 404

"The people most enthusiastic about rules are the ones who gain power through them."

me

no. 403

"Science advances one funeral at a time."

attributed to Max Planck


Actually, according to Wikiquotes, he said something more along this line: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." But really, he said the original in German, so consider the above to be a loose, boiled-down translation, maybe.

no. 402

"If you are a complete fucking asshole, Rush Limbaugh tells you exactly what you want to hear. He says that all the Others are stupid, lazy, cheating, inferior, and most importantly that any way you hurt them is their fault and they have no right to expect any sympathy or self-control from you whatsoever. That latter is particularly important. It’s the reasoning of the domestic abuser, and the reasoning of the cultural conservative."

Frankensteinbeck, commenting on Balloon Juice

no. 401

“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

Abba Eban, an Israeli politician and diplomat




(citation)

no. 400

"The Rude Pundit doesn't give a damn how we got this information about our government's spying on us. What enrages him is being told he shouldn't worry about it, that he should just go about his business and let the professionals do their work. He naively believes that the failure to call "bullshit" on bullshit just because you like the bull is how you help democracy die faster."

The Rude Pundit

no. 399

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."

Clarence Darrow

no. 398

"Debate is impossible because American Conservatism is a cult. Period. Full stop. Its main trait is now nothing more than broad-spectrum reality denial and its main weapon in the fight to keep reality at bay is THE DECIBEL."

Driftglass

no. 397

"Ed Ochester has a poem that goes something like (paraphrasing, including the spacing):

A retired miner in Dr. Cappaletti's office, crippled and wheezing:

"If someone tells you he
got rich from
hard work ask him
whose."

Might be from his book Dancing on the Edges of Knives."


junior, commenting at Gin And Tacos

no. 396

"A world where we don't need workers is also a world where we don't need owners."

Patrick, commenting at Gin And Tacos

no. 395

You cannot call yourself pro-liberty, even including the word in your name, if you are unwilling to recognize that the greatest oppressive force opposing freedom in America is unregulated greed. Libertarianism is a philosophy for the well-off, the privileged, and those who dream someday of being a wealthy boss with power over the peons. When capital is the measure of success, those who have it thrive at the expense of those who don’t; when we don’t have redistribution of wealth, we do not have equality of opportunity.

The US is already a libertarian paradise, and look what it gets us: a widening gap between rich and poor, a rotting infrastructure as the exploiters look for short term gains while neglecting services vital to those who can’t afford a limousine service, a corrupt and decadent privileged class, and thriving new political parties that are simply nuts. To use one of Ayn Rand’s favorite words, this country is infested with looters: only they’re not the poor, they’re not the mythical “welfare queens”, they’re bankers and obscenely overpaid executives and corporations that demand the right to buy elections.

And there stand the libertarians, the useful idiots who cheer them on.

P. Z. Myers, So I Invented a New Law the Other Day

stolen whole cloth from Rational Rant, who knows a thing or two about quotes.

no. 394