no. 620

"And that's what civilization is. A complex set of rules detailing who is allowed to steal from who."

Sam Starfall in the webcomic "Freefall" (comic #fv03174)

no. 619

Patricia: "My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement."

From the film "Joe vs. the Volcano"

no. 618

"Yes what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?" 

David Mitchell

no. 617

"All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color."

Warren Beatty in "Bulworth"

no. 616

“It is a hopeless misjudgement to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the German nation. The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.”

- Theodor Wolff, Prominent German journalist, January 1933

Proving journalists are far from omniscient

no. 615

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

Martin Luther King

no. 614

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people, it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

James Baldwin

no. 612

"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure."

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

no. 611

"...sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself, that's what sin is."
     "It's a lot more complicated than that-"
     "No. It aint. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried they wont like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
     "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes-"
     "But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

From Terry Pratchett's book Carpe Jugulum

no. 610

“The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.”

Eugene V. Debs

no. 609

“There is something wrong in this country; the judicial nets are so adjusted as to catch the minnows and let the whales slip through and the Federal judge is as far removed from the common people as if he inhabited another planet.”

Eugene V. Debs

no. 608

"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" 

Anton Chigurh.

no. 607

"Well behaved women seldom make history."

Lauren Thatcher Ulrich

no. 606

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”


 P.C. Hodgell

no. 605

"Running away is embarrassing, but useful."

Supposedly a Hungarian proverb

no. 605

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” 

Malcolm X

no. 604

“Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.” 

Malcolm X

no. 603

“As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends on one’s mastery of the language.” 

Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

no. 602

“I am not domestic,” he muttered under his breath as he worked the spatula to save the pancake. “I am a force of nature which cannot be contained.”

From Michael Anderle's book "Compelling Evidence"

no. 601

“Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.” 

James Baldwin

no. 600

"When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant."

Thomas Jefferson...

Or perhaps not. Good phrase nonetheless.

no. 599

I wondered... if the people who had moved the jobs, whoever those people had actually been, ever came back to the city now , even to just drive through. And I wondered, when they did, what kind of feelings they might have, how they would explain the situation to themselves in a way that left them feeling like good people. Profit fed the life we lived, I knew that and saw the necessity of it. But those people had made a god of profit, it seemed to me, and according to the rules of their religion, if it was profitable to close the factory and ship the jobs overseas, then it was morally right. In order to keep from feeling guilty, they had, I supposed, devised all sorts of ways of thinking about what they did and didn't do, all sorts of clever rationalizations. It occurred to me that, in a different arena, I might be in the habit of doing the same thing.

Roland Merullo, from Breakfast With Buddha

no. 598

"Skepticism of authority is a built in prerequisite for a thinking person"

John Cusack on Twitter

no. 597

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it." 

George Orwell, 1984

no. 596

"Murphy was an optimist".

Unknown

no. 595

Do you know how to tell the difference between cow shit and bullshit?
You throw it up in the air, if it comes down, its cow shit. If it doesn’t, its bullshit!

Old joke, apparently

no. 594

“It's only illegal when individuals do it. When governments and big business do it, it's perfectly legal. And if it isn’t, it very soon is."

Timothy Ellis in “Hero To The Rescue”

no. 593

"You can let your anger drive you, but don't let it steer." 

Daniel Keyes Moran

no. 592

"When the media is owned by those who believe they have the right to choose leaders, and who also believe that only the rich have the right to make decisions, the media ceases to be an objective reporting tool, and becomes an instrument of criminal conspiracy."

Timothy Ellis in "Hire A Hero"

no. 591

"I wonder not to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

Johnathan Swift

no. 590

“One thing I was coming to believe. If your number is up, you should have at least one last good bonk, before you go.”

From Tim Ellis’ book “Make Or Break The Hero”

no. 589

"Some men rob you with a six-gun -- others rob you with a fountain pen."

Woody Guthrie

no. 588

“Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is. . . When Hitler said that a day would come in Germany when it would be considered a “disgrace” to be a jurist, he was speaking with utter consistency of his dream of a perfect bureaucracy.”

From Hannah Arendt’s  1963 book, “Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

no. 587

“The demagogue doesn't lead radicals, he radicalizes his supporters. With each outrage he drags them down by association until they feel they have no one else, and no one else will have them. It works.”

Garry Kasparov

no. 586

“...that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." 

Thomas Jefferson

no. 585

“Implicit faith saves an infinity of trouble. How happy were we in submitting to the government, adopting the prejudices, and aping the manners of a nation, which we conceived to be the glory of the world, and the perfection of human nature?”

Francis Hopkinson, founding father from New Jersey

no. 584

"In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear."

Cory Doctorow in "Zuck's Empire of Oily Rags"

no. 583

“But the liberal attitude does not say that you should oppose authority. It says only that you should be free to oppose authority, which is quite a different thing. The essence of the liberal outlook in the intellectual sphere is a belief that unbiased discussion is a useful thing and that men should be free to question anything if they can support their questioning by solid arguments. The opposite view, which is maintained by those who cannot be called liberals, is that the truth is already known, and that to question it is necessarily subversive.”

Bertrand Russell

no. 582

"Jesus never asked Christians to make a Christian nation"

Brandi Miller on Huffington Post

no. 581

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

Octavia Butler

no. 580

"The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do." 

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

no. 579

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."

Thomas Jefferson

no. 578

Donald Trump needs to end every speech by staring at the audience & screaming "Are you not entertained?"

John Fugelsang

no. 577

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.” 

George Bernard Shaw

no. 576

“If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them"  

Paul Wellstone

no. 575

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires"

Susan B Anthony.

no. 574

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

Camus

no. 573

"As long as you hate, there will be people to hate."

George Harrison

no. 572

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."

 Cicero

no. 571

"But see, that's the trick. That's how the GOP have this narrative. They constantly play the aggrieved underdog. They kick a homeless guy in the ribs and then say he attacked them and broke their foot. And the media, somehow, inexplicably, buys it every time."

Chuck Wendig

no. 570

“Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” 

Howard Zinn

no. 569

“Most Canadians' response to Trump's Justin Trudeau tantrums: "Meh." If it were Obama, Bush, or Romney, it would feel more serious. But no one takes Trump seriously.

Gold comes out of gold mines, lava comes out of volcanoes, and shit comes out of assholes. Commensurate with expectations.”

Ali A. Rizvi

no. 568

"A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability."

Robert F. Kennedy, 1966

no. 567

"I just want to hang on to the tiger and ride it as long as I can."

Anthony Bourdain, who, sadly, committed suicide yesterday.

no. 566

"The gloom had lasted until Gus Moynihan, a retired college professor who was renovating one of the grand old Victorians on Upper Main Street, wrote a guest newspaper editorial decrying the town’s mordant defeatism and criticizing the current Republican administration’s unspoken policies, which could be summed up, he claimed, in nine words: No Spending. None. Ever. On Anything. Under Any Circumstances. Why not string one last banner across the street, he suggested: LET’S EAT DIRT."

From Richard Russo's novel, Everybody's Fool. 

no. 565

“Please understand that a lot of what the right does, and it’s maybe their greatest genius, is they’ve created a code of conduct that they police, that they themselves don’t have to, in any way, abide.”

Jon Stewart

no. 564

"Veiled threats work better when they don't promise a better quality of life."

Mike, speaking in the comic "Something Positive" (12/19/17)

no. 563

“Calling you "racist" isn't political correctness run amok. It isn't an attempt to shut down debate. It isn't even really meant as an insult (even though, yes, it is one). It's a way of defining your beliefs. If you think that people should be treated differently because of the color of their skin or if you voted for leaders who believe that and act on it, then what else should you be called? I mean, "Republican" works, too, except that there are still one or two Republicans who aren't motivated by hatred of non-whites. So "racist" is just a shorthand way to describe an ideology. And, yeah, I do think racists are bad people because, well, they're racists. But that's not racism on my part.”

The Rude Pundit

no. 562

“I feel this beginning to happen...a sign that an epiphany is imminent, followed by inevitable changes. This is a very good thing. 
Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore.”

from "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows"

no. 561

“If humans could fly, they’d consider it exercise and never do it”

Nick Offerman

no. 560

“All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

I. F. Stone  In a Time of Torment (1967)

no. 559

"Every day seems to deepen the severity and magnitude of our never-ending national facepalm."

John Pavlovitz in his essay, "The United States of Embarrassment"

no. 558

The pattern is astounding in its consistency:
They have no interest in contributing to the common good.
They will never build—they will only subtract.
They are incapable of creating anything meaningful or beautiful or life-giving.
They only know how to destroy.
They only know how to take.
They only know how to use up.
That is what cancerous things do.
They pollute.
They kill.

John Pavlovitz discussing Donald Trump and the Republican Party (e.i., the Party of "No")

no. 557

"If you insist that the needs of other children aren’t everyone’s responsibility, then you insist that children have no intrinsic value to society until they prove profitable. 

Eventually society will believe you."

Julius Goat on Twitter, discussing Republicans' concern for human life actually being a need to control.

no. 556

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Eugene Debs

no. 555

"Writing is thinking, and good, honest thinking involves revision."

Richard Russo in Everybody's Fool

no. 554

“They say nothing is impossible , but I do nothing every day”

Pooh, in the Christopher Robin movie

no. 553

 "When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither the facts nor the law is on you side, pound the table” 

old trial lawyer's adage

no. 552

"We need to become better at recognizing when an idea proposes an exclusive space, hidden as a proposal for a safe space.

An exclusive space is when full access to public life is seen as the right of a specific type of person, to the necessary exclusion of others.

People who benefit from exclusive spaces really love exclusive spaces.

A safe space is a space that becomes necessary when exclusive space already exists. It's a place that exists for that excluded other, and creates within a small specific parameter the full access to life that should already exist for them everywhere.

People who benefit from an exclusive space HATE safe spaces, it should be noted.

They point to those little pockets of safety from themselves as evidence that they themselves are victims of exclusive spaces."

Julius Goat, on Twitter

no. 551

“Everybody who votes I think is entitled to an opinion. If you don’t vote, I don’t think you’re entitled to an opinion. But I’ve always voted, all my life. I’ve never missed an election and when people say, ‘Hey, Hamill, shut up. Stick to acting,’ I said, ‘Really? I mean would you say that to a truck driver? Hey, shut up. Stick to truck driving.’ No. His vote is as important as mine and I think that’s the great equalizer. That’s what’s so great about democracy.”

Mark Hamill

no. 550

"All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color."

Warren Beatty as Sen. Jay Billington Bulworth

no. 549

"One of the great errors of an elite education in the United States was that it taught those attending to think that intelligence and academic achievement were measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense, equating their value with their education. Further, there are many types of intelligence, but the ones supported were academic in scope. There was little understanding of the value of social, emotional, and artistic intelligence. Those who had intellectual intelligence promulgated their type at the expense of others."

Michael Anderle in the novel "Payback Is A Bitch"

no. 548

"Life's a water slide where you die at the end."

Brian Sack's 11-year old son in a birthday card to his him.

no. 547

"Gee, I'm real sorry your mom blew up, Ricky."

Lane Myer in "Better Off Dead"

no. 546

"Jesus H. Christ and his All-girl Orchestra!"

An oath I read on Twitter.

no. 545

“I would much rather be excluded for whom I include than included for whom I exclude.”

Unknown

no. 544

"At some point, we have to start presuming that when Republicans do things with foreseeable bad consequences, it's because they want those consequences, not because they want something else."

NCSteve on Twitter

no. 543

"No, if you claimed to be embarrassed by Barack Obama but you're somehow not embarrassed by Donald Trump—I'm going to strongly suggest it was largely a pigmentation issue."

John Pavlovitz

no. 542

"Hillary Clinton wouldn't have been capable of the malice and malpractice Trump is capable of, simply because she's a rational, level-headed, intelligent, articulate, compassionate human being—and he is none of those things.”

John Pavlovitz

no. 541

"Libertarians are born on third base and spend their entire lives trying to make people believe they hit a triple."

-Lip Gallagher

no. 540

"When the elderly, sick, and vulnerable are left without resources by this Administration, it will be the Progressives, Muslims, Jews, Humanists, and Atheists—not the Conservative Christians who will care for them as Jesus would have."

John Pavlovitz

no. 539

"Conservatives really truly thought if their butter-mold of a hate golem won, all the non white straight cis christian male people would just go back into the boxes of shame and invisibility the right had prepared for them.

They think it’s so disrespectful that none of them have."

Julius Goat on Twitter, discussing Respect.

I put this here because "butter-mold of a hate golem" is now my favorite description of Trump.

no. 538

"This exhaustion is a national epidemic.

This fatigue has become commonplace here now.

In this Presidency, America is living dog years.

We're all aging unnaturally rapidly, friends."


John Pavlovitz on Twitter.

no. 537

"If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning."

Gwen Goodnight

no. 536

"I had a long talk with a friend tonight, and he pointed out that the law is a fine thing, even when it’s wrong. It’s the only defense we have against anarchy, against the strong overwhelming the weak. And if it’s wrong, well, then it’s our job to change it."

Grady, in Jennifer Crusie's novel "Charlie All Night"

no. 535

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment feels like discrimination” 

Thomas Sowell

no. 534

Cosmo Kramer: Just tell him you don't want to do the bootleg. I'm sure he'll understand. 
Jerry: People with guns don't understand. That's why they get guns. Too many misunderstandings.

no. 533

“Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don't stare at it. It's too risky. Ya get a sense of it and then you look away.”

Jerry Seinfeld

no. 532

”You have to be odd to be number one”

Dr. Suess 

no. 531

"The glory of justice and the majesty of the law are created not just by the Constitution - nor by the courts - nor by the officers of the law - nor by the lawyers - but by the men and women who constitute our society-who are protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law." 

Robert Kennedy

no. 530

"There's something very human about taking something so great and ruining it a little, so you can have more of it."

Michael, talking about frozen yogurt, in S1E6 of "The Good Place"

no. 529

"Once again, none of these philosophers is ever talking about masturbation"

Chidi tutoring Eleanor in S1E4 of "The Good Place"

no. 528

“I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.”

Jon Stewart

no. 527

“I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.”

― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

no. 526

“I always wonder when you see someone saying "I need my gun so the government can't put me in a death camp", jesus, how can you live in a country you perpetually believe is one step from murdering millions of its citizens? That must be stressful. I mean, are you not worried that every time you go to the post office they are just going to lock the doors behind you and start pumping in carbon monoxide?”

Eoin Howe, commenting on Republicans

no. 525

“It's a direct result of their decades long campaign to build up an immunity to irony.”

Matthew Quirk, commenting on the GOP’s lack of a sense of humor.

no. 524

“Unintentionality?” Mica asked as she soldered the top onto a canister. “Is that a word?” 
“It’s like unpredictability,” Yumi said, “except with a higher chance of death being the result.”

From “Relic of Sorrows” by Lindsay Buroker

no. 523

"One prefers to be civil on Twitter, but here’s an idea for you: Fuck off. Then keep fucking off. Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying “You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here”. Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever."

Michael Marshall Smith

no. 522

“America’s boys are broken. And it’s killing us.”

Black cites an outdated model of masculinity as the culprit, “where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others.”

“They are trapped,” he writes, “and they don’t even have the language to talk about how they feel about being trapped, because the language that exists to express the full range of human emotion is still viewed as sensitive and feminine.”

Michael Ian Black < https://nyti.ms/2CbA9kd >

no. 521

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness”

Terry Pritchett in “Men at Arms”

no. 520

"Both mass shooters and gun defenders agree that violence with guns is the best possible solution for the problems they perceive in the world, and themselves the most appropriate possible instrument to deliver it.

They disagree only on the appropriateness of target."

Julius Goat, on Twitter after the latest school shooting.

no. 519

“There is no anchor any more. At the core of the administration of the most powerful country on earth, there is, instead, madness.”

~ Andrew Sullivan



For future reference, this is about the Trump administration.

no. 518

"One of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky...and he said 'look,' he said, 'you Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.'" 

Marie Howe (h/t Joseph Fasano)

Language activates an idea and a circuitry in your brain. And the result of that is every time a circuit is activated, its synapses get stronger. So the more you hear certain things, even if you just hear and understand them, the circuitry gets stronger.

From a FB Post by George Lakoff

http://www.dw.com/en/dont-retweet-donald-trump-and-dont-use-his-language/a-42213110

no. 517

When the media is owned by those who believe they have the right to choose leaders, and who also believe that only the rich have the right to make decisions, the media ceases to be an objective reporting tool, and becomes an instrument of criminal conspiracy.

From the book “Hire A Hero”, by Timothy Ellis

no. 516

“As you've seen, the relentless return of U.S. conservatism to hatefully anti-science error always turns out to have been bought and paid for by cynical oligarchs. Manipulators who are never brought into account for the countless lives their delaying tactics wrecked.”

David Brin, ostensibly discussing the Tobacco Industry, but also so much more. 

no. 515

“Being a dissident is rooted in the belief that if everyone knew, the tide would turn against injustice. Dissidents don’t want you to be comfortable. They feel compelled to act and they want you to care as much as they do.”

Garry Kasparov

no. 514

"I was born with a reading list I will never finish." 

Maud Casey

no. 513

"The fact that homosexuality exists in 1,500 species and homophobia exists in one is proof that love is something human beings need more of."

Lacey Roop

no. 512

"It's true that the early bird gets the worm, but the early worm gets eaten."

Me