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