no. 675

"You can put a baked potato in the cockpit of a 747; that don't make it a pilot."

A. R. Moxon talking about President Donald J. Trump on Twitter.

no. 674

"The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor."

Dorothy Day

no. 673

“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views.” 

Doctor Who


Yeah, I know he's a fictional character, but for all his impact on the world, he might as well be real

no. 672

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness."

Oscar Wilde. This is the full quote.

no. 671

"You can organize a book burning but we will always whisper them to each other, share them in the dark and let amazing art be the trees whose shade our children will use to write their own books that need to be burned."

@JurlinaAntonio

no. 670

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them." 

Maya Angelou

No. 669

"R(ight)W(ing) psychology is instinctively deferential to hierarchy. Kiss up & shit down."

David Roberts (@drvox) on Twitter

no. 668

“And it was a choice. Never pretend you were forced. There is no force great enough to compel someone to do such things. There was no ulterior motive, no greater good. You did it for a pat on the head and a chance to have even more power. What more could you want, Ilia? You held lives in the palm of your hand and destroyed them at a whim. What more could you ever want?” 
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
 “I don’t.” He shook his head. “But neither do you. That’s the worst part. You don’t even know what you wanted. You just killed and killed and killed. You were a force of evil and destruction without even having the decency to care why you did those things. The universe will be better off without you.” 
She screamed as his knife drove into her heart and twisted. With another scream, ripped deep from within her, she grabbed it and dragged it out. With only seconds remaining, she turned her face to the stone wall so that his face would not be the last thing she saw. 
Barnabas stood, looking down at her body. 
"It’s not enough, is it?" Shinigami asked. 
"It’s never enough", Barnabas told her. "I stopped believing in heaven and hell long ago—at least, as they’re spoken about in the religious texts. But I can see why the thought of them has endured. The idea that she could do so much wrong and just die, not living more than a moment of the terror and pain she inflicted, is an injustice I do not want to let go."

From The Vigilante Chronicles by Natalie Grey and Michael Anderle

no. 666

“Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.”

A. Philip Randolph, 1889-1979

no. 665

“No voting on who gets to be people.”

N. K. Jemisin

no. 664

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” 

George Orwell

no. 663

“Socialism is a scare word they've hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, & independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.” 

Harry Truman, 1952

no. 662

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” 

Clarence Darrow

no. 661

“Imagine if the media covered a hurricane not by describing its effects (damage done, lives lost, injuries inflicted) but by bringing on two people to debate whether there really was a hurricane.

That’s how they cover racism, and apparently anti-semitism too. The effects can never be discussed; we can only debate if it happened.”

Gin and Tacos on Facebook

no. 660

"Life is not a ledger. Your sins can't be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins."

Cory Doctorow

no. 659

"The fact that some people still have consciences isn’t an aggression against people who have sold theirs away."

A. R. Moxon

no. 658

"Religion is first and foremost about worship of a being referred to as God, or Allah, or some other name, where said God has created man in his image. It’s a set of rules to live by, created around a social gathering where you worship. It gives people structure, organization, and a social group of people who all believe the same. But worship is directed through the church, and deviation from how the church says things should be is punished. They preach love, and practice intolerance of everyone who does not belong to their faith, usually without being aware of it."

From Timothy Ellis' book Hero At The Gates

no. 657

“20 years ago if you had a CCTV watching you while you ate your dinner, it was because you were in a supermax prison, and today it’s because you’ve got Apple Home or Google Home or Alexa in your kitchen.”

Cory Doctorow

no. 656

"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." 

James Baldwin

no. 655

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

  James Baldwin

no. 654

“When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.” 

David Brin

no. 653

“English isn’t a language, it’s three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat.”

des-zimbits

no. 652

"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire"

George Monbiot

no. 651

'And they always find a rational explanation for the supposedly supernatural events, but nobody ever mentions the talking dog. '' Hmmm. Egyptian exhibition possibly haunted by a mummy? Let's investigate!" You're having a conversation about this with a Great Dane and he is actively disagreeing with you! Deal with the issue at hand!'

A character in Dave Turner’s book “How To Be Dead” discussing “Scooby-Doo”

no. 650

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..."

Noam Chomsky

no. 649

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.” 

Christopher Hitchens

no. 648

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”

H.L. Mencken

no. 647

"I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. 
I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be." 

Bob Dylan

no. 646

"Never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity.  The grave will supply plenty of time for silence."

Christopher Hitchens

no. 645

"'Forged in fear, nostalgia and groupthink' is DEFINITELY the name of my new band."

David Blaustein AF (@blaustein)

no. 644

“In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.” 

Hannah Arendt

no. 643

"I’d observe that evil isn’t usually a product of creativity or innovation. Evil is usually the corruption of things that are already good, by degrading them down or elevating them up out of their proper places.

Take prosperity, for example. To prosper is good. It’s very good. But when prosperity becomes more important than questions of whether your prosperity will cause people to die who might otherwise have lived, then prosperity—a good thing—has become badly corrupted."

A R Moxon

no. 642

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”

Virginia Woolf, diary entry, March 1940

no. 641

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."

George Orwell

no. 640

"Secrecy is the cornerstone of all tyranny." 

Robert Heinlein

no. 639

"Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority."

Mary Wollstonecraft

no. 638

"We all have our limits. I can’t save the world. I can’t stop this war. Maybe, just maybe, I can communicate a few things through art.”

Ginny, in Kate Eliot's book, An Earthly Crown

no. 637

“An enemy is not he who injures, but he who wishes to do so.” —DEMOCRITUS OF ABDERA

from Kate Eliot’s book “Jaran”

no. 636

“Most of the universe sucks. This is the only good planet. I mean, this is the only planet with whiskey and all my friends live here.” 

NASA scientist, @DrKateMarvel

no. 635

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

Thomas Pynchon

no. 634

“But, sir, honoring his legacy is about the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes.”

@LFredenhall on Twitter

no. 633

"As crimes pile up they become invisible." 

Bertolt Brecht

no. 632

"It's never what a man says that’s important. It’s what he does."

Daniel Winters in Michael Anderle's book The Horsemen Gather

no. 631

"One person with passion is better than 40 people merely interested."

E.M. Forster

no. 630

“To create something is to make something that has never existed before. There is nothing more vulnerable than that.”

Brené Brown.

no. 629

"I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it."

Ann Richards.

no. 628

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to  sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. " 

Anatole France

no. 627

“The quality of a civilisation depends upon its ability to discern and reveal truth, and this depends upon the scope and purity of its language. Any dictator attempts to degrade the language because this is a way to mystify.” 

Iris Murdoch

no. 626

“The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough.”

Eugene Debs

no. 625

“If you want to move the center, you have to pull from one end.”

David Roberts, journalist

no. 624

"I'm not so much a trophy wife; more of a participation trophy wife."

rachelle mandik on Twitter

no. 623

"It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant."

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny (p. 73). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

no. 622

“If I were to write a 50-page text on how to think about class in the 21st century, I would begin by saying the problem of class is not the problem of the poor, the working class or the middle class. It’s the problem of the ruling class — of a capitalist class that’s so immensely wealthy that they are capable of destroying the world as a side effect of their private pursuit of gain.”

Erik Olin Wright 1947-2019

no. 621

“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

G. K. Chesterton