Bloggers from the United States

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

"Let today be the first day of a new American Revolution - a Digital Revolution, a revolution built not on blood and conflict, but on language and reason and our faith in each other."

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 or 20 years from now she will come to me and say, "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?""

"The decisions we make about the Internet don't affect just the Internet – they are answers to basic questions about the relationship each citizen has to the government and about the extent to which we trust one another with the full range of fundamental rights granted by the Constitution."

"The remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech."

"Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger."

"In short, individual freedom of speech leads to a stronger society. But knowing that principle is not enough. You have to know how to put it to use on the Net."

"When I worked as a journalist in the 1980s, I was constantly reminded by sources of the common asumption that a newspaper or magazine article wouldn't get things right or would distort the facts to reflect a particular bias. [...] The major newspapers, magazines, and television networks, which are typically, if not always, components of larger corporate organizations, are increasingly regarded by Americans as just another special interest."

"But don't confuse it with the first vision of "electronic democracy" [...] one day, we were told [in 1992], we'd listen to pundits and politicians debate the issues, and then we'd vote, maybe by pointing our remotes at our TV or computer monitors. Radical pluralism is something different. It's what happens when you put the power of a mass medium—computer communications—into the hands of individual citiens who could never have afforded creative access to other mass media like TV or newspapers. Everyone is now a "content producer"."

"It's easy for a senator or a government official to blur the line between speech that's offensive and speech that lacks social value, yet in practice it's often the offensive speech that's the most valuable."

"I first became aware of this larger phenomenon in the wake of the bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City. In the days and weeks to follow, I got dozens of calls from the press asking me whether there was legislation pending to ban bomb information on the Net. [...] In reality, of course, the "Internet as threat" meme was generated and disseminated primarily by the press itself."

"The more you impose such liability, the greater the incentives you create for providers to become content police, and you undermine what for many and perhaps most users is the chief value of the Net: direct communication with the rest of the world."

"Leaving aside the issue of whether the comments about Arata and Branham were grounded in hostility toward their gender (rather than hostility toward them as individuals), it seemed clear that what the OCR wants to ban here is not "written conduct" but speech. By classifying it as "conduct," the OCR hoped to bypass the First Amendment's protections."

"Perhaps the most likely scenario is this: At some near-future date, perhaps as early as 2010, individuals may no longer be able to do the kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools in 2003. [...] You can't overestimate the extent to which the two factions are bot pro-copyright [...]. One thing the Tech Faction and the Content Faction have in common is that both supported the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998."

"[The online users reaction to the cyberporn panic] may have been far more effective than a planned event would have been, however. It had vigor, spontaneity, and popular sentiment behind it and was driven by passion and not by calculated maneuvering. And it proved the power of online communities to take on the traditional media establishment, once the playing field has been leveled. The WELL and the World Wide Web and Usenet had leveled the field."

"What adds to the uncertainty, Hansen said, is that the "defenses" provided by the statute—that is, the things you have to do to avoid criminal liability—are defined in terms of whatever filtering or screening technologies happen to be available at any given moment [...] use of "reasonable and effective measures under current technology". As a result, Hansen said, the defenses will change every time the technology changes."

"That is why I found the tactics of the theocratic social conservatives deeply offensive. They were afraid that their convictions about pornography were unlikely to sway the majority of citizens in this country—so afraid, in fact, that they contrived a crisis (the threat to children posed by cyperporn) and even went so far as to help craft and position a purportedly objective (but in fact fraudulent) study whose real, cynical purpose was to promote a panic-driven anti-indecency legislative agenda."

"America is a country ready to be taken—in fact, longing to be taken—by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process."

"The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife."

"When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling."

"Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there."

"Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial melt­down. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies."

"Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is"

"By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office"

"We need a third metric of success, which include our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? And our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss, and our capacity to give, and to be kind"

"I’m asking people to realize that whatever our job in the world is, whatever our dreams are, we are bigger than that. If we can find that, who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing no matter what the challenges and the obstacles are"

"My mother would constantly say to me: ‘Don’t miss the moment’, because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past"

"I started life so self-judgmental. I call the voice in my head the ‘obnoxious roommate’; always putting me down, telling me I’m not good enough. And learning to actually deal with that voice, with a sense of humor – maybe getting it to dance with you – in order to evict it from my head. Then we are much more present"

"The time-famine we are talking about is really what drains us, because it means we are not here. We are somewhere else with our minds"

"I want to look at how we can build a path forward for our lives, which is more sustainable and less fueled by burnouts, sleep deprivation, exhaustion"

"When I am not joyful, I look at what happened. I don’t mean joyful as in there are no challenges, problems etc., I mean when I’m not like ‘Hey this is great, I’m blessed, I’m doing something I love, I’m grateful’ – when I don’t have that feeling, I know that I’m off; I need to course correct"

"Tap into your creativity – even if it isn’t a part of your job. It’s one of the things that our culture has suppressed. Every child is creative; they sing, they draw. But then at some point if we can’t make a living out of our ‘creative love’, we drop it. But in fact it’s great to maintain in some way"

"I think a lot of people who would say they are atheists, when you really scratch the surface, they have a sense of spirituality or mysticism or wonder of the mystery of life, but they don’t believe in a particular creed. For me, really, what matters is to have that sense that there is something amazing and mysterious about life; that we haven’t figured it all out and the journey of exploring it is fascinating"

"Ariana Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision."

"These days it seems like any idiot with a laptop computer can churn out a business book and make a few bucks. That's certainly what I'm hoping. It would be a real letdown if the trend changed before this masterpiece goes to print."

"Ninety percent of all new business ventures fail. Apparently, ten percent of the time you get lucky, and that's enough to support a modern economy. I'm betting that's what separates us from the animals; animals are lucky only nine percent of the time. I suspect this is true because I play strip poker with my cats and they rarely win. In fact, it's gotten to the point where they run like cowards at the sound of my electric shaver."

"It's useless to expect rational behavior from the people you work with, or anybody else for that matter. If you can come to peace with the fact that you're surrounded by idiots, you'll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others."

"You're only as important as your furniture. And that's at peak levels of dignity. [...] If you think about it, you can get fired but your furniture stays behind, gainfully employed at the company that didn't need you anymore."

"A Mission Statement is defined as "a long awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly." All good companies have one. Companies that don't have Mission Statements will often be under the mistaken impression that the objective of the company is to bicker among departments, produce low-quality products, and slowly go out of business."

"Contrary to popular belief, it's often your clothing that gets promoted. [...] Always dress better than your peers so your clothes will be the ones selected for promotion. And make sure you're in your clothes when it happens. One man made the mistake of bringing his dry cleaning to work and ended up as a direct report to his own sports jacket."

"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."

"The office is designed for "work," not productivity. Work can be defined as "anything you'd rather not be doing." Productivity is a different matter. Telecommuting substitutes two hours of productivity for ten hours of work."

"If not for the compulsion of engineers, mankind would have never seen the wheel, settling instead for the trapezoid because some Neanderthal in Marketing convinced everybody it had great braking power. And there would be no fire, because some middle-manager cave person would point out that if fire was such a good idea the other cave people would already be using it."

"The goal of change management is to dupe slow-witted employees into thinking change is good for them by appealing to their sense of adventure and love of challenge. This is like convincing a trout to leap out of a stream to experience the adventure of getting deboned."

"The most important skill for any leader is the ability to take credit for things that happen on their own."

"I have a saying: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.""

"As a manager you could do a lot of thinking, experimenting, and continuous training. Or you can just do what everyone else does and blindly follow my directions like an unthinking zombie. Blind obedience is easier than the alternatives and the pay's the same. In fact, the pay is better, if you look at it from an hourly perspective."

"Always "lead by example." Let's say you're trying to reduce costs in the company. You can set an example by ordering your chauffeur to get his hair cut at Super Cuts. This is the kind of personal sacrifice that inspires the employees. Soon you'll be able to squeeze their health benefits like a tourniquet on a seedless grape."

"When we are born, all humans are clueless, self-absorbed, and helpless. Most babies will grow out of it. Those who don't become managers."

"When you have an exceptionally nasty project, present it to your employee as a "challenge." That seemingly minor change in syntax will cause the employee to feel like an Olympic athlete instead of the boot-stomped carpet mite that he is."

"Rumors are an excellent way to keep your employees nervous and edgy, which is similar to being alert. Actually, it's better. When they're alert they realize what you're doing to them and they resist. But when they're edgy they work like crazed bumblebees and die of stress before they become cynical. In other words, everyone wins."

"The most efficient way to implement an empowerment program is to have meetings where you punish people for the decisions they made while at the same time encouraging people in the group to think for themselves. Eventually, the employees become numb, thus developing a healthy tolerance to the hopelessness of their situation. Hopelessness isn't the same as happiness, but it's enough to make the employees stop complaining, and that's a good start."

"People don't change their basic nature, they just accumulate more stuff upon which they can apply their stupidity, selfishness, and horniness. From this perspective, the future isn't hard to predict."

"Technology magnifies the ability of one person to have a big impact on other people. If that doesn't scare you, then the next time you see professional wrestling on television, look at the crowd shots and ask yourself if you'd like those people to have a bigger impact on your life."

"Of all the things that influence elections, it appears that information is the least significant. Elections are won by the candidate whose staff members are the most skilled at manipulating the voters. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because you have to be quite smart to figure out the best way to manipulate millions of Induhviduals into marching in the same direction."

"A growing number of workers -- those who are more clever than industrious -- have already discovered the unbridled joy of sitting at home and getting paid for sleeping, eating, masturbating, and watching television. This technique -- sometimes called telecommuting -- has all the financial advantages of being employed with none of the stigma of being a filthy, perverted hobo."

"Companies form confusopolies to make it impossible for the average Induhvidual to determine who has the lowest price. This way each major company gets a share of the pie, the size of which depends on how skillfully they can dupe customers with advertisements. That will be the primary job of marketing professionals in the future-- disguising the true cost of your product in order to be a successful confusopolist."

"The first thing that young people need to realize is that the concepts of "career" and "job security" are a bit dated. In the future, most people's jobs will involve scrambling around like frightened chipmunks trying to find the next paycheck in an endless string of unrelated short-term jobs. But since "Frightened Chipmunk" doesn't look very impressive on a business card, people will call themselves entrepreneurs, consultants, and independent contractors."

"Rich guys used to be able to manipulate the stock market and make huge profits at the expense of smaller investors. It was big news when the small investors discovered they'd been screwed. Now there are many safeguards against the small investor ever finding out how much he's getting screwed."

"I predict that news outlets will try to compensate for the loss of relevant news by focusing on stories that are more shocking and depressing than ever. At least that way they'll get your attention and sell advertising even if the stories aren't "news" in the traditional sense."

"What if there are other optical illusions about our existence that are just as major as the illusion of the Sun revolving around the Earth? [...] What are the odds that you live in exactly the window of human existence when all of the major optical illusions have been discovered? Wouldn't that be an amazing coincidence, since every previous generation of humans has believed they were born in that window of time?"

"Thinking is easier than working. And the best kind of thinking is the kind where you don't have to write anything down, i.e., "meeting thinking." When you think up an idea during a meeting, all you have to do is blurt it out. You won't have to involve any parts of your body except your mouth and maybe your brain stem."

"Never laugh when you're being sarcastic. It will ruin the effect. If you feel the uncontrollable need to giggle, wait until your boss says something hilarious, such as, "Is this only Wednesday? It feels like Friday already!" Then you can throw back your head, open your mouth like you're about to swallow a live porpoise, and laugh like a naked teenager in a field full of pussy willows. Sincerity like that will make your sarcasm all the more convincing."

"Unless you work alone, one of the biggest assaults on your happiness is something called a meeting. A meeting is essentially a group of people staring at visual aids until the electrochemical activity in their brains ceases, at which point decisions are made. It's like being in suspended animation, except that people in suspended animation aren't in severe physical discomfort and praying for death."

"Trying to win an argument with an irrational person is like trying to teach a cat to snorkel by providing written instructions. No matter how clear your instructions, it won't work. Your best strategy is to reduce the time you spend in that sort of situation."

"Creativity doesn't require much time. But creativity always needs your energy. You can't create if you're pooped or your brain is full of junk. A person who manages creativity makes sure his schedule has lots of free spaces, no matter how many priorities are looming."

"For humor to work, it must be original. It's easy to create original humor -- or anything else original -- if you follow my formula. [...] Identify someone who has more creative talent than you do, then try to imitate that person exactly. If you're like me, you can depend on your lack of talent to make your imitation look nothing like the source. Over time, you'll drift even further from the source of your theft, thus becoming "original.""

"The hardest part of writing humor is finding a topic that hasn't already been used more times than the only back scratcher at the Institute of Very Itchy People. Ideally, you want a situation that makes you smile even before the humor has been added. If you start with a fresh and inherently funny situation, you're halfway home. [...] If a topic makes you gag, or clench your buns, or laugh, or sigh, or retch -- or react physically in any way -- you have a winner."

"Some humor experts say the secret to humor is to combine something unexpected with something bad and then make sure it's happening to someone else. But if that's all it took, serial killers would be winning comedy competitions. The evening news is full of unexpected bad things that happen to other people. Most of it isn't funny, unless it involves exploding whales, ear biting, or pies thrown at billionaires."

"If you're going to create, create a lot. Creativity is not like playing the slot machines, where failure to win means you go home broke. With creativity, if you don't win, you're usually no worse off than if you hadn't played."

"Four billion people say they believe in God, but few genuinely believe. If people believed in God, they would live every minute of their lives in support of that belief. Rich people would give their wealth to the needy. Everyone would be frantic to determine which religion was the true one. No one could be comfortable in the thought that they might have picked the wrong religion and blundered into eternal damnation, or bad reincarnation, or some other unthinkable consequence. People would dedicate their lives to converting others to their religions."

"It is absurd to define God as omnipotent and then burden him with our own myopic view of the significance of human beings. [...] The concept of 'importance' is a human one born out of our need to make choices for survival. An omnipotent being has no need to rank things. To God, nothing in the universe would be more interesting, more worthy, more useful, more threatening, or more important than anything else."

"We like to believe that other people have the same level of urges as we do, despite all evidence to the contrary. We convince ourselves that people differ only in their degree of morality or willpower, or a combination of the two. But urges are real, and they differ wildly for every individual. Morality and willpower are illusions. For any human being, the highest urge always wins and willpower never enters into it."

"People think they follow advice but they don't. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don't waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do."

"Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversation reminds us that we are part of a greater whole, connected in some way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless."

"Express gratitude. Give more than is expected. Speak optimistically. Touch people. Remember names. Don't confuse flexibility with weakness. Don't judge people by their mistakes; rather, judge them by how they respond to their mistakes. Remember that your physical appearance is for the benefit of others. Attend to your own basic needs first; otherwise you will not be useful to anyone else."

"People who have children have the best work-avoidance excuses in the world. If you don't have kids, get some immediately. The playgrounds are full of them."

"There's a special word for bosses who care about their employees: unemployed. The whole point of being a boss is to get employees to do more work than they want to do and to accept less pay than they deserve. If a boss starts caring about employees, it screws up the whole oppressor-victim dynamic of capitalism."

"The only people who serve on juries are people who have nothing better to do. Many of those people have jobs, which means jury duty is more pleasant than their jobs! [...] If my job was less pleasant than jury duty, I'd want to convict innocent people just to see their eyes bulge when they hear the verdict."

"It's illegal to kill yourself in a quick and painless way, but if you do it slowly over a few decades -- say by not exercising -- that's called laziness, not suicide, and it's completely legal. You might even get credit for being jolly or get a job as a TV chef on a cable network."

"The only person who wants real fairness is whoever has the worst life on earth, because he has nothing of his own to share in return. I don't know who that person is, but I have a mental image of a naked guy with no arms and legs, living in a rented poison ivy patch and being forced to read this book."

"The fastest way to spot a weasel is to look at a shiny surface. The second-fastest way is to look for people who are certain about the future. When a person conveys a sense of certainty during times of great uncertainty, that is either a sign of mental illness called "leadership" or a sign of a weasel who is trying to get his way."

"Humanity is like a huge organic computer. The hardware is functioning fine — reproducing more humans, creating food, learning — but the software is broken. Beliefs are our software. When the software works properly, our beliefs help us survive. Sometimes there are glitches in the software, in the form of delusions that are harmful. My job is to remove the glitches."

"Extermination had begun. A thick rain of missiles streaked through the sky and landed on hospitals, schools, bridges, homes, mosques, businesses, and military targets. The missile crews and jet pilots didn't know what they were blowing up or why. [...] No one questioned why entire blocks — eventually entire cities — were being annihilated. Everyone did his job as if it were nothing more than delivering packages."

"The public didn't know who said it first, but it was the most powerful question in human history. In nine words it overturned centuries of tortured logic and magical thinking. It pushed superstition into a cage and gave common sense room to maneuver. [...] The question was translated into thousands of languages, published billions of times. In English it was "If God is so smart, why do you fart?""

"Facts don't matter. What matters is how you feel."

"I want to be clear that I'm not expressing a preference for ignoring facts."

"If your debate partner leaves the realm of fact and reason for any of the diversions I mentioned, you just won the debate. Declare victory and bow out."

"A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful."

"Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason."

"A skilled persuader who understands both social media and the news business can easily stir the pot to create an advantage through chaos."

"The things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That's persuasion."

"Did my persuasion make any difference? There is no way to tell."

"Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don't want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does."

"Trump can invent any reality he wants for the less important topics."

"Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end."

"If there is one thing that our role models in this election have taught us, it's that omitting important information is completely different from lying."

"The biggest issue in this election is something called flip-flopping, and all candidates are accused of doing it. A strong leader is expected to maintain steadfast resolve in his opinion even if the environment changes or he gets new information. In any other context, that would be considered the first sign of a brain tumor. When presidents do it, it's called leadership, and frankly, we can't get enough of it."

"As you know, the best way to solve a problem is to identify the core belief that causes the problem; then mock that belief until the people who hold it insist that you heard them wrong."

"Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt."

"The world isn't fair, but as long as it's tilting in my direction I find that there's a natural cap to my righteous indignation."

"Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn't mean I can't be the first."

"They say that dogs lick their own genitalia because they can. But I think it's at least partially because they don't have the Internet."

"Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately."

"There’s nothing more humbling than seeing your best quotes in a list, and thinking they could have been written by a coma patient with a keyboard and spasms."

"If an economist uses a complicated model to predict just about anything, you can ignore it. By analogy, a doctor can’t tell you the exact date of your death in 50 years. But if a doctor tells you to eat less and exercise more, that’s good advice even if you later get hit by a bus. Along those same lines, economists can give useful general advice on the economy, even if you know there will be surprises. Still, be skeptical."

"My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser."

"You might think the word “homemade” is just a word we use as a marketing ploy. But what you don’t realize is that the staff sleeps here at night. If your tablecloth is wrinkled, that’s why."

"We know the goats are imported because they don’t speak English."

"If you think it’s easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you’ve probably never tried."

"If you have questions about this salad, give your server the spinach inquisition."

"Named after the great romaine emperor, Julius Salad."

"We smoke the bacon so you don’t have to."

"This sandwich used to include endive, but no one wanted to eat a BELT."

"Our salmon sandwiches are so good you’ll want to swim upstream to our kitchen and spawn. But please don’t."

"If our mushrooms make you hallucinate, please inform us immediately so we can overcharge you."

"We use only the finest days of the week in this dish."

"This dish might not turn you into a syndicated cartoonist, but whatever you’re doing now probably isn’t working either."

"If you don’t believe your salmon is wild, ask it to fetch your newspaper and see what happens."

"Stacey puts a little love in each pasta shell. But it’s self-love, so it won’t help you that much."

"Biblical scholars tell us that this is the same meal that Jesus ate at the last supper. But hey, I’m sure you have a good reason for ordering something else."

"Our scallops are so delicious your mouth will thank you, which is creepy because your mouth can actually talk."

"The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management. This has not proved to be the winning strategy that you might think."

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."

"The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn't ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, "Here's your square hole"? The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I'm saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness."

"Years later, when "Dilbert" was in thousands of newspapers, people often asked me if I ever imagined being so lucky. I usually said no, because that's the answer people expected. The truth is that I imagined every bit of good fortune that has come my way. But in my imagination I also invented a belt that would allow me to fly and had special permission from Congress to urinate like a bird wherever I wanted. I wake up every morning disappointed that I have to wear pants and walk. Imagination has a way of breeding disappointment."

"But history has turned on a few people—like the Founding Fathers and Jesus Christ come to mind—who used the same tricks: They describe to people a better vision of themselves. And Trump fits into that [model] in the most direct way you could possibly do. He’s saying, "You're an American, I'm going to make you feel great"."

"I am saying: I see a flame thrower. I think the flame thrower guy wins in the stick fight."

"When you understand persuasion ... the truth is not as useful as it should be ..."

"I think New Yorkers are more provocative in every way."

"If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year. Republicans will be hunted. Police will stand down."

"Much of politics is about hating imaginary people."

"I thought it was true until I saw it in the news."

"[P]olitics is about winning the definitions of words."

"When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options [...] 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him."

"If one more person hallucinates to me about some "program" where teens are kidnapped and "fixed" and returned to their happy parents, I might explode. No such thing exists. You have two options. Only two. No help is coming. Only death and suffering."

"If I were to invent a solution to the dangerous young man problem, I think it would involve putting them all in one place so they could only hurt each other, not necessarily in jail, just away from society. Once they are separated from society (and drugs) maybe help is possible."

"Political differences are mostly a matter of what frightens you the most, with a thin frosting of rationalization on top."

"If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people—according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll—that's a hate group. I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed."

"You should absolutely be racist whenever it's to your advantage. Every one of you should be open to making a racist personal career decision."

"Most of my income will be gone by next week [...] My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can't come back from this, am I right? There's no way you can come back from this."

"In a way I think [Trump] may have brought it on himself. His very first statement about Hillary Clinton should be in jail. I feel like when he started talking real jail then politics changed. And [the Democrats] said "If you're going to talk real jail for us, we're actually going to put you in jail." And it looks like that's what's happening."

"Every single one of our large entities, we've seen, is corrupt. From the FBI to the DOJ. I'm not talking about every person, but at least leadership elements. We've seen that our congress can be corrupt. We've seen that the CDC, basically everybody's corrupt once you find out what's really going on. The exception, we're told, is all 50 separate elections for a national election, all 50... All 50 of them are all good, but everything else is corrupt? But not those 50 things?"

"[About the 2024 US presidential election:] It feels like not an election to find your best guy, or woman. [...] It screams two sides trying to stay out of jail."

"There is no such thing as as news about public figures that's true."

"The way that most political hoaxes are done is that the person who gets cancelled did a real thing, lets say it's on video or they wrote it in this email, but nobody can imagine how that could be out of context. [...] You look at it and you go 'You know, I don't know the whole story, but how in the world could I be wrong about this? I'm looking right at it. It's really clear.' And that's how the trick is done, because there are ways to manipulate it to its actual opposite."

"If your job is to look for that stuff, any offense, well you're gonna find it because that's your job. And the more you find, the more you're worth I guess, because you found a lot of it."

"If you could reframe race relations, that would be the biggest win in America. And so here's my reframe: Every time somebody says 'The average of this group is not doing as well as the average of this group', they're fucking you. They are not your friend."

"I could not have been luckier. I have the luckiest cancellation of anybody who's ever been cancelled. [...] It just couldn't have been better. It just absolutely could not have been better."

"Every calamity has its bard, and downsizing's is Scott Adams."

"Scott Adams is a very, very funny guy who writes a brilliantly perceptive comic strip."

"In the popular political imagination we're familiar with the neocons as conniving militarists, masters of intrigue and cabals, graspers for the oil supplies of the world, and all the rest. But here we have them in what I suspect is the truest light: as college kid rubes who head out for a weekend in Vegas, get scammed out of their money by a two-bit hustler on the first night and then get played for fools by a couple hookers who leave them naked and handcuffed to their hotel beds."

"Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power."

"If you think back to the Swift Boat debacle of 2004, the surface issue was John Kerry's honesty and bravery as a sailor in Vietnam. Far more powerful, however, was the meta-message: George Bush slaps John Kerry around and Kerry either can't or won't hit back. For voters concerned with security and the toughness of their leaders, that's a devastating message — and one that has little or nothing to do with the truth of the surface charges. Someone who can't fight for himself certainly can't fight for you. At the time I called it the "Republicans' bitch-slap theory of electoral politics.""

"To the president the Democrats should be saying, Double or Nothing is Not a Foreign Policy.The great bulk of the public doesn't believe this president any more when he tries to gin up a phony crisis. They don't believe he'd have much of an idea of how to deal with a real one. Enough of the lies. Enough of the incompetence and failure.No buying into another of the president's phony crises."

"With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself — not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology — is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, "You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried."But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender.But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism — or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism — for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton."

"There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that "it's not the crime, but the cover-up."But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable."

"The president just seems to be living in some sort of alternative universe populated by the failed gods of his narcissism and vainglory."

"Primitive animals will sometimes keep chattering or twitching their muscles even after their heads have been cut off. And that's probably the best analogy today to the president's continuing enunciation of his policies."

"Get away from the fear. Don't fear the terrorists. They're mothers and fathers."

"President Bush almost killed me."

"You know, you can imagine in China it's like: "Ching chong, ching chong chong, Danny DeVito, ching chong chong chong, drunk, 'The View,' ching chong."

"But I'm also gonna give you a fair warning that there's a good chance I'll do something like that again, probably in the next week -- not on purpose. Only 'cause it's how my brain works."

"the president of the usa has always hated the fact that i see him for who he is - a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself - this is why i moved to ireland - he is a dangerous old soulless man with dementia who lacks empathy compassion and basic humanity- i stand in direct opposition all he represents- so do millions of others - u gonna deport all who stand against ur evil tendencies - ur a bad joke who cant form a coherent sentence #nevertrump"

"This was the nature of secular power. Industrial power. It was the West that invented it, that invented Hitler, the gutter orator turned trampler of nations, that invented Stalin, the man they called “Genghis Khan with a telephone.” The media pop star, the politician. Was there any difference anymore? Not in America; it was all a question of seizing eyes, of seizing attention. Attention is wealth, in an age of mass media. Center stage is more important than armies."

"Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?"

"As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute. The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up. These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day."

"Tomorrow composts today."

"Interstitialism is very postmodern, in that it calls old definitions into question without bothering to invent plausible new ones."

"Mashups [...] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."

"There are a lot of times and places where "humanity" is headed in no place in particular. Those scenes interest me. Like, little European cultures with weird minority languages, who are just hanging around in obscure mountain valleys, making clay pots and singing, and knifing each other on Tuesdays... It's not like we all line up and dash like mad for some end-goal called "The Future." There's no victory-condition for being human. The future is just a kind of history that hasn't happened yet."

"These people are setting entire new standards for nightmarish postindustrial anti-chic. Only heavy-duty cosmopolitan San Francisco Bay area performance artists, who double as the Dilberts from Hell, could dress with such miraculous anti-fashion sense. ... Mark Pauline is a creative force first, a human being second, and a nice guy at a very distant tenth."

"The autumn sun shone brightly. It was still the same sun and the same clouds. The sun didn’t care about the landscape inside people’s heads."

"The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality."

"Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don’t innovate. And it’s innovation that’s the real threat."

"Real life was where the baby was."

"Laura listened to their crude P. R. with sour amusement. They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought."

"When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions."

"Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets."

"You know what that is? That’s peasant technology, brother. It’s slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what’s left of the planet’s tropical forests? It’ll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that’s what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe."

"Where there’s war, there’s whores."

"She’d read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world’s havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five."

"The world doesn’t give a shit how noble your motives are—it’ll roll right over you. That’s how it works."

"I’ll grant you good intentions, but intentions don’t count for much. Corruption—that’s what counts."

"You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have born from time immemorial—they all lived. It wasn’t that the world didn’t care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity."

"Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity’s bio-technologies."

"My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides."

"The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a culture nut."

"Emily Dickinson didn't even publish books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard to get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's ear."

"I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with very intelligent, very small, invisible computers...You could have some entertaining way to play with them, or more likely they would have some entertaining way to play with you."

"I don't think that as a culture today we're very interested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot more interested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we long to reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and never grow old."

"When you're deconstructing a book it's like you're psychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says, you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural reasons for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful not to let it get its message through or affect you deeply or emotionally in any way."

"This [deconstruction] is a way for modern literateurs to handle this vast legacy of the past without actually getting any of the sticky stuff on you. It's like it's dead. It's like the next best thing to not having literature at all."

"For God's sake don't put my books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope... don't tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece of hardware, because hardware is even more mortal than I am, and I'm a hell of a lot more mortal than I care to be."

"Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking place."

"Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future has passed it by."

"Science fiction is a pop medium and a very obsolescent medium...science fiction has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle of literary excellence... we try to do this sometimes, but generally we have to be really drunk first."

"Ladies and gentlemen to hell with the marvellous power of storytelling. If the audience for science fiction wanted storytelling, they wouldn't read goddamned science fiction, they'd read Harpers and Redbook and Argosy... We're not into science fiction because it's "good literature," we're into it because it's weird."

"Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude."

"Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them...Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it."

"Don't become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish."

"You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by knocking it off with the bullshit."

"Working seriously, improving your taste and perception and understanding, knowing what you are and where you came from, not only improves your work in the present, but gives you a chance of influencing the future and links you to the best work of the past. It gives you a place to take a solid stand."

"Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people."

"Maybe we were forced to conform to that tradition, for the sake of futurity. But the truth is, fatherhood was good to me. Today, there’s a boy, eight years old, who depends on me for guidance in this world. So now I realise: life can’t be all about me. Me, and my own favourite things: interaction design, aesthetics, robotics, metaphysics... When you and I built a child, that forced me to realise how much this life matters!"

"“But Dad... what if I just beat people up with my baton? Wouldn’t they have to do whatever I say?” Pitar laughed. “That’s been tried. It never works out well.”"

"As tempers rose, a compromise was urged by certain moderates, whom everyone ignored."

"The Dark Age world had all kinds of potential issues that might bother Anita Atkinson: climate crisis, state collapse, financial ruin, mass extinction, catastrophic population dieback. None of those things bothered Anita, though, because she didn’t understand long words."

"My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times. I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue."

"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."

"People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity.""

"The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life."

"If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop."

"(introduction) This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong."

"Imagine finding out you got rejected from community college, then finding out that your alcoholic father got arrested for domestic abuse, you lost all your life savings in a Ponzi scheme, and all of this happens to you while you're on the space shuttle Challenger. Then you wake up and it's all a bad dream, except you realize that you're at work without clothes on, and work is NASA and you're really on the space shuttle Challenger. That's what this movie is like, only infinitely worse. Everything about this movie pissed me off, save for the lesbian finger bang scene. Except even that sucked because it wasn't in the movie."

"There are very few people who look good in red lipstick, and those people usually juggle for a living."

"When the iPhone was first announced, CEO Steve Jobs spewed enough BS to cover a football field full of babies 3 feet deep in bullshit, which sounds cool because he could have potentially murdered a football field full of babies, but he passed on this opportunity by introducing the phone instead."

"There aren't many things I don't want to experience in life, but the sensual caress of a parent going through mid-life crisis is one of them."

"There are only three reasons you should ever be this delighted about anything, and all of them involve you being a hot chick, meeting me, and lube."

"I've only had one dream in my life with kids in it that didn't involve me gnawing my feet off, and it had to do with kids doing my laundry.""

"Watching this video is like being bukkaked with stupid."

"What are the odds that a simple geometric folding of a $20 bill with elements of design that were conceived in 1928 by a committee of treasurers, a full 42 years before the World Trade Center even existed, could accidentally contain a representation of both terror attacks? Pretty good, apparently."

"Science can learn a lot from someone this stupid."

"Don't you retards think before you click "Send" that maybe someone on the other end is actually going to read your stupid, malformed emails some day? It's almost like there's a record full of incomprehensible bullshit playing in your mind 24/7, and you put the needle down randomly and whatever it picks up, you just type it up in an email and shoot it off to me, usually mid-sentence."

"Notice the telltale sign of a man who has a penchant for boy ass: the pedophile-smile or 'pedosmile.' It's part smirk, part grin, and all molester. It's like he's having a two-for-one sale on rape, no refunds or exchanges."

"Fernando is wanted for 'murder with a deadly weapon' according to the FBI website. As opposed to being wanted for murder with a non-deadly weapon?"

"Elizabeth Duke is possibly the only person on the FBI list wanted for communism. What a bitch! Duke was a member of the extremist group, May 19th Communist Organization, whose objective was the violent overthrow of the US. The group was largely active from 1978 to 1985, at which time they got busted and thrown in jail where their new objective became to prevent any violent uprisings in their ass. She's the only one still around. It's not really a group anymore if it's just you, dipshit! America wins."

"Okay, here's a tip: if you're doing something creepy like molesting children, you don't need to take topless photos of yourself to seal the deal. We know, the pedosmile is enough."

"Kenley is alleged to have sexually assaulted her eleven-year-old stepson, then ditched out on bond. The FBI says Kenley has ties to Arkansas. Talk about trying to find a needle in a hay stack."

"If you've ever wondered what someone who's horny enough to pay a bunch of adolescents $5000 in cash in exchange for some action looks like, take a good look at Ms. Walker's picture. Three words: battery operated dildo. Or if you happen to be a stickler for brevity like I am, just one word: cucumber. Because, damn."

"I've pissed higher than the tallest building in Utah."

"HOLY SHIT, I LIVE NEXT TO THE DRY PEA AND LENTIL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD? Why didn't anyone tell me??? Here I've been shit-listing Utah for all these years, when I've been living in a state that borders the dry pea and lentil capital of the world. I hereby revoke anything bad I've ever said about Idaho. And by revoke, I mean reaffirm."

"New rule: if your state has more cows than people, you don't get to be a state anymore."

"It simultaneously warms my heart and wears my delete key when I get emails from twelve-year-olds."

"Thank you Joe Nobody for giving me your expert opinion on what missile sounds like, because gas station superintendents are usually the best people to ask about the sonic signature of ballistic missile thrust."

"Most of the screen on a blog is blank for an imaginary populace of readers still using 640x480 resolution. I didn't buy a 19" monitor to have 50% of its screen realestate pissed away on firing white pixels, you assholes."

""This sounds like the soundtrack of a coma." (On U2's song One Step Closer)"

"Look out pop-culture! Bono has had enough of 'romantic love'."

"...you could sell these people hookers in a vagina storm."

"General Grievous," a bad guy so sinister, his very name stands for PAIN AND SUFFERING. Nice job assholes... Why not just call all your characters "Evil" and "Bad" next time?"

"Note that the name of the show is 'Trippin' ' and not 'Tripping' because the addition of the letter 'g' would not be consistent with the views of MTV's urban youth demographic who tend to frown upon linguistic formalities such as proper enunciation. I mean, proper 'nunciation, yo!"

"The theme song states "YOU GOT THE POWER TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE... YOU GOT THE POWER TO MAKE A CHANGE." Wow, thank you MTV, for making me feel empowered and independent, like only a multinational media conglomerate can."

"It's every man's dream to have a penis so large that he must hire a small boy to carry it."

"There's no shame in masturbation, unless you get caught."

"Passing out while you try to kill yourself is like failing at failing."

"I have a different stance on abortion: I'm against abortion, but for killing babies. That way everyone loses, and I win. I'm neither pro choice, nor pro life; I'm pro you-shutting-the-hell-up. The only way I'd be "pro choice" is if it meant I could choose which babies I could abort, and only then if I could lift the age restriction to 80.""

"I was going to write about how I was going to take away women's right to vote, but that one is pretty obvious since nobody wants women to vote, except for women, and they don't count."

"She started crying when she saw the busted colon I gave her pussy husband, so she took one of her shoes off and threw it at me. I caught the shoe between my pecs and I started to laugh like a pirate. Then she started walking towards me to take her shoe back, and there was no way I was going to let this bitch get near my chest so I body slammed her into a cactus that happened to be there. She got up and was uglier than before, so I did what I always do when women start to cry: I went back inside to play video games."

"That reminds me of how much I hate babies. Why does everyone want to save them? There are too many babies. I'm not saying we should kill them, but if you happen to be giving your baby a bath and the phone rings.. well, nobody will judge you. Besides, you might get free brownies out of it at the funeral, and brownies rule."

"I'm impressed that they've been able to take a 2D character with a 1D personality and bloat it into a 3D disaster."

"It was like Rambo sent them all Christmas cards, but instead of cards it was murder."

"I've got pissing people off down to a science."

"It's not that I rule, it's that everyone else sucks more than I do. We all suck, and whoever sucks the least is king."

"If trashy television was a video game, The Jenny Jones show would be the final boss."

"The earth's population is about 6 billion. At 15 minutes per person, that amounts to over 171,000 years we'd have to spend just sitting around watching people be "famous." To hell with that."

"The next person's phone I hear set to Vivaldi is going to need a hydraulic pump to pry their phone out of their ass."

"Is someone you know anorexic? A good joke would be to tell them that they're fat. They'll laugh because anorexic people aren't fat. HAHAH"

"I hate the help screen, I hate the options, I hate the card graphics, I hate the default window size, everything. I HATE SOLITAIRE."

"If people who look different don't necessarily think differently, which they don't, then aren't they essentially discriminating against them by "embracing" them as being "diverse"?"

"… the real reason ADD exists is because executives at pharmaceutical companies need to make their Lexus payments."

"When I say this game is hard, I mean hard like nipples-on-a-blind-lesbian-in-a-fish-market hard."

"I don't get it: they re-package the same shitty football games every year, update a few stats, call it a new game and millions of suckers keep buying them. What's the point? Why not just go outside and play real football instead? Or even better yet, get bent. Nobody likes football."

""This car just looks terrible; it looks like it was designed by a blind child with arthritis. In a coma." (on the Honda Element)"

"Why are politicians so full of shit? Why can't there be a congressman (congressman, yes man, tough shit to all you feminists) that just speaks his mind without the meaningless bullshit and ass kissing?"

"My Nuts are just under critical mass, a few inches away from collapsing into a super dense vortex of nutsaqutron (a type of radiation given off by enormous balls)."

"Having spelling errors is one thing, but c'mon. I've typed out more coherent sentences with my penis."

"If there were a building that stood for grammatical integrity, this email would be the plane that crashed into it."

"I subscribe to an email service from CNN called "CNN Breaking News." Basically every time shit hits the fan, you're supposed to receive an email. Most of the "breaking news" I've received has been as earth shattering as an actor arrested for drunk driving. Wow, now excuse me while I change my freshly soiled boxers."

"How can a movie be "one of the best"? There's only one "best" movie, so saying something is "one of the best" is stupid and doesn't make sense. Technically any movie that's not the worst could be considered "one of the best." Imagine that, another empty phrase used by marketing people. I want to punch someone in the throat."

"In an effort to salvage the money I wasted on this bullshit, I ate six cups of jello, one bag of corn nuts, a Soynut bar, and a bag of jelly beans for dinner. The only thing X-TREME about this experience was the X-TREME dump I took later that night:"

"For example, the cover on the right depicts Lobo (also known as "the main man") kicking Santa's ass. Santa did something to piss Lobo off (or nothing, it makes no difference), and Lobo RUINED HIS SHIT."

"No, I'm not a democrat or a republican. I'm just a guy who's tired of the bullshit."

"President Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Good I say, global stability was getting to be a pain in the ass."

"Whales are drinking all our water and eating our sailors."

"Finally when the movie started, I thought the bullshit ads were over, but no. First thing they showed was a "coke break" sponsored and produced by coke. [...] I paid $7 for a movie, NOT FOR BULLSHIT ADVERTISEMENTS."

"What the hell is "partly cloudy" supposed to mean? When is it not partly cloudy? … Just tune into a weather forecast. Chances are you'll hear the phrase at least 3 or more times."

"The next time you ask someone how their day is going, expect, no, DEMAND a response. Don't settle for good. Demand the truth. Make them admit that they're having a shitty day, and then do your best to make it worse."

"I can't go on, I'm going to go do something less painful like stick my dick in the oven."

""If you got caught screwing around on the job, you'd probably get fired, and so would I. Why should he get away with it?" (on Bill Clinton)"

"...'SummerGrl19?' Very clever handle by the way, the only way you could make it any more unoriginal or cliche would be to add the words 'happy, cute' or 'princess' to the name."

"There are pigs that can manipulate joysticks, yet you morons can't even send me an intelligible email."

"The only thing that goes with Crocs is social Ostracism."

"Let's face it: there are few things in this world more stupid than dancing. Except break dancing, which pirates and lumber jacks would agree is awesome. Other than that, dancing makes me envy cripples."

"If women ran the world, we'd still be searching for the wheel."

"Some people think I'm conceited. Oh well. All my friends think I'm better than they are. Sometimes my friends ask 'so how come you rule so much?' One time I decided to play basketball, but I suck at basketball so I lost. Just kidding, I kicked everyone's ass because I'm the best. I own everyone at everything. There's no use in trying to be as good as me because it's impossible. There aren't enough words to describe how good I am. THE UNIVERSE REVOLVES AROUND ME. I AM KING. Everyone wishes they were me. EVERYONE. If I weren't me, I'd wish I was. I love me."

"6. You realize that if 10 million people saw the movie once, each wasting 3 hours of their lives, that 30 million hours have been wasted, and that if each person lived an average of 70 years, 3,424 years, or 49 lives will have been wasted watching the Titanic. James Cameron has effectively murdered 49 people. (Not necessarily a reason to cry, but it is to a sap that saw Titanic in the first place)."

"(introduction) "this page is about my opinions. if you disagree, you have a right to your opinion and i can respect that.""

"u know what? i thought about it and ive decided that your right, i shouldnt make fun of people who get fast cars. please accept my apology.............. psych! yeah right homo."

"4 example the other day i saw a black person walking down the street and i was like "omg a negro" but instead of walking on the other side i said "what would rumsfeld do?" so i stayed on the sidewalk. when he came up to me i wanted to show him that i have no problems with people of color so i said "hey" and offered him my spare change before he could even ask."

""my friend and i were watching mtv the other day when nelly came on and my friend was like "omg nelly rules". hes such an idiot, he only listens to trendy music. at least i like original stuff like beyonce."

"i hope that earns me some eprops (proper recognition in an electronic form lol) LOL LOL LOL!!!"

"HEY FAGGOT, YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY WE CARE ABOUT TERRI SCHIAVO AND NOT CANCER PATIENTS? BECAUSE FUCK YOU. SHOVE THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT. FUCK OFF!"

"My time coming, any day, don't worry about me, no Been so long I felt this way, I'm in no hurry, no. Rainbows end down that highway where ocean breezes blow My time coming, voices saying, they tell me where to go. Don't worry 'bout me, no no, don't worry 'bout me, no And I'm in no hurry, no no no, I know where to go. California, preaching on the burning shore California, I'll be knocking on the golden door Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light Rising up to paradise, I know I'm going to shine."

"Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age."

"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs..."

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

"I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace."

"It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing."

"I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood. I also believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. I'm convinced that such an angel dwelled in Cynthia. I felt this presence often in Cynthia's lightness of being, in her decency, her tolerance, her incredible love. I never heard Cynthia speak ill of anyone nor did I ever hear anyone speak ill of her. She gave joy and solace to all who met her."

"With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it. We felt it was our gift to the world. We wanted to show the hesitant the miracle that comes when two people give their hearts unconditionally, honestly, fearlessly, and without reservation or judgement. We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now."

"Among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been changed into a dreadful warning. But I must tell you that had I known in the beginning that I would be here today doing this terrible thing, I would still have loved her as unhesitatingly, because true love is worth any price one is asked to pay. The other message we wished to convey was one of faith in the essential goodness and purpose of life. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know."

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here."

"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."

"Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don't have something that assures fair use, then you don't have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass."

"You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment — the Internet — with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief. The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob."

"It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government."

"I'm a free-marketeer. I believe in free markets, but... sometimes you have things that look like free markets but aren't because of artificial reasons. I'm not very happy with the current state of what calls itself free market economy in the world because you've got all these grotesque monopolies that are able to game the system in a way that's to their advantage by virtue of their power, and that's not a free market. A real free market has some kind of countervailing influence from the government to keep a monopoly in check, but this government... it's not about free marketing principles, it's about greed pure and simple. And this government wants to assure that the other people that they went to college with get just as rich as they do. This country is going to make Mexico look like Sweden inside of ten years in terms of wealth distribution, because there are no countervailing forces. They've eliminated tax basically for the ultra-rich, they've eliminated any control over monopolies, the greedy have free reign and its just going to be the super rich and the peasants."

"I was always raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, about individual liberty, about fiscal responsibility, about balanced budgets, about a wariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There's a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they're Republicans, I'm not. But I'm really not a very comfortable Democrat. I mean the Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to be a bunch of dithering pussies... and it was pathetic. So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone."

"I wasn't tempted to vote for Bush, but I understand why people did… because he obviously had integrity. It was a terrible kind of integrity, but he does what he says and he means what he says. And what he says is terrible and what he does is terrible, but he's consistent. So I think a lot of people in Wyoming who care so much about integrity that they're willing to choose somebody that has a monstrous willingness to do any damn thing as long as he's up front about it — but that's not really quite enough for me. I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I'm an Alan Simpson Republican."

"Polyamory — that's where you're freely confessed that you have more than one lover at a time. And actually I'm less that way than I used to be, but I was trying to make people understand, that at least for some folks, this was a fairly natural state. And instead of skulking around about it that we'd all do better to avoid the deceit and be honest."

"The world lost a true hero today, a Renaissance man who was a relentless warrior for our freedom."

"It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance. Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity's problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism'.”"

"“Estimated Prophet,” words by John Barlow, music by Bob Weir, has always worked a special kind of magic. Barlow captures that whole slightly (or very) deranged or tripped-out Deadhead vibe so well, but the song’s character transcends that little box over time — both over the time the particular rendition might take, and over the time from when we may have first heard it played or performed to the most recent rendition we have heard. That character stands there in my mind’s eye, calling down the thunder, and he seems so sure, so devoted to his vision, that he stands for everyone who was ever caught up in a transforming belief, who gave in to delusions of grandeur, who believed himself the center of the universe — but wait — haven’t we all done that, at least to some degree? It’s human nature to consider oneself the center of the universe. … Barlow calls on plenty of biblical imagery for the lyrics, with the sea parting before the singer, and fire wheels burning in the air, etc. Pretty much your average run-of-the-mill vision for an experienced Deadhead. The interesting thing, for me, is the notion that this character is a prophet. And therein lies a more subtle biblical reference, not at all overt, but hovering in the back of our minds, perhaps, if we have any biblical training. Namely, the notion, expressed by Jesus in three of the four gospels, and therefore likely to be something he really did say, that a prophet has no honor in his own country. … This is one of those songs, and there are quite a number of them in the Dead’s repertoire, in which a not-entirely-sympathetic character is brought to life, and, in the course of being brought to life, is made more sympathetic."

"This life is fleeting, as we all know — the Muse we serve is not. John had a way of taking life’s most difficult things and framing them as challenges, therefore adventures. He was to be admired for that, even emulated. He’ll live on in the songs we wrote..."

"If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade'"

"If there is one single area of economics in which path dependence is unmistakable, it is in economic geography – the location of production in space."

"In the course of describing my formative moment in 1978, I have already implicitly given my four basic rules for research. Let me now state them explicitly, then explain. Here are the rules:1. Listen to the Gentiles 2. Question the question 3. Dare to be silly 4. Simplify, simplify"

"I do not mean to say that formal economic analysis is worthless, and that anybody's opinion on economic matters is as good as anyone else's. On the contrary! I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders, and imagine that they achieve greater sophistication by avoiding stating their assumptions clearly. The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible (more on that below). But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing."

"But the honest truth is that what drives me as an economist is that economics is fun. I think I understand why so many people think that economics is a boring subject, but they are wrong. On the contrary, there is hardly anything I know that is as exciting as finding that the great events that move history, the forces that determine the destiny of empires and the fate of kings, can sometimes be explained, predicted, or even controlled by a few symbols on a printed page. We all want power, we all want success, but the ultimate reward is the simple joy of understanding."

"If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God."

"If economists ruled the world, there would be no need for a World Trade Organization. The economist's case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case—that is, it says that a country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do."

"It is a bit funny, but also quite sad: Those who preach the doctrine of global glut are tilting at windmills, when there are some real monsters out there that need slaying."

"The idea of comparative advantage—with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both—is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed."

"There is nothing that plays worse in our culture than seeming to be the stodgy defender of old ideas, no matter how true those ideas may be. Luckily, at this point the orthodoxy of the academic economists is very much a minority position among intellectuals in general; one can seem to be a courageous maverick, boldly challenging the powers that be, by reciting the contents of a standard textbook. It has worked for me!"

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

"Now I’m not saying that Keynes was right about everything, that we should treat The General Theory as a sort of secular bible - the way that Marxists treat Das Kapital. But the essential truth of Keynes’s big idea - that even the most productive economy can fail if consumers and investors spend too little, that the pursuit of sound money and s is sometimes (not always!) folly rather than wisdom - is as evident in today’s world as it was in the 1930s. And in these dangerous days, we ignore or reject that idea at the world economy’s peril."

"So the story of the baby-sitting co-op is not a mere amusement. If people would only take it seriously—if they could only understand that when great economic issues are at stake, whimsical parables are not a waste of time but the key to enlightenment—it is a story that could save the world."

"Here, then, is a revised version of Marshall's rules: (1) Figure out what you think about an issue, working back and forth among verbal intuition, evidence, and as much math as you need. (2) Stay with it till you are done. (3) Publish the intuition, the math, and the evidence - all three - in an economics journal. (4) But also try to find a way of expressing the idea without the formal apparatus. (5) If you can, publish that where it can do the world some good."

"In short, the success of macroeconomic activism, in both theory and practice, has made it possible for free market microeconomics to survive--again both in theory and in practice."

"The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the theory has powerful emotional appeal. Usually that appeal is strongest for conservatives, who can't stand the thought that positive action by governments (let alone—horrors!—printing money) can ever be a good idea. Some libertarians extol the Austrian theory, not because they have really thought that theory through, but because they feel the need for some prestigious alternative to the perceived statist implications of Keynesianism. And some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors. But moderates and liberals are not immune to the theory's seductive charms—especially when it gives them a chance to lecture others on their failings."

"The serious lesson of the antics in Argentina, then, is that the big issues of --fixed vs. flexible exchange rates, whether countries should have independent currencies at all--are still wide open. It's an eternal controversy, and not even the pope can resolve it."

"So you can take your pick as to which Mundell you prefer; but the Nobel committee basically honored Mundell the younger, the economist who was iconoclastic enough to imagine that Canada, of all places, was the economy of the future--and was right."

"The whole subject of the liquidity trap has a sort of Alice-through-the-looking glass quality. Virtues like , or a known to be strongly committed to , become vices; to get out of the trap a country must loosen its belt, persuade its citizens to forget about the future, and convince the that the government and central bank aren’t as serious and austere as they seem."

"There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do."

"...Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil companies...Exxon, headed by Mr. Raymond, chose a different course of action: it decided to fight the science....And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics....the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because ExxonMobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science."

"It’s a tribute to the importance of Friedman’s work that questions about his legacy bear so directly on contemporary policy issues. But for that reason it’s also important not to engage in . Friedman was a great economist, but like every other great economist in history, he was also wrong about some important things."

"Whether the influence of increasing returns on trade and geography is rising or falling, one thing is clear: much was learned from the intellectual revolution that brought increasing returns into the heart of how we think about the world economy. It wasn't just that economists could make sense of previously puzzling data, we found ourselves able to see things that had previously been in an intellectual blind spot. Many people contributed to this process of enlightenment; I'm proud to have been a part of the journey."

"So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing."

"I know that when I look at today’s Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. On the other side, however, open immigration can’t coexist with a strong ; if you’re going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can’t make that offer global. So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it’s an agonizing issue."

"… politics determine who has the power, not who has the truth."

"It’s a great honour to be asked to give this talk, especially because I’m arguably not qualified to do so. I am, after all, not a Keynes , nor any kind of serious intellectual historian. Nor have I spent most of my career doing macroeconomics. Until the late 1990s my contributions to that field were limited to international issues; although I kept up with macro research, I avoided getting into the frontline theoretical and empirical disputes."

"If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. … There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus."

"...and Newt [Gingrich] — although somebody said "he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like," but he is more plausible than the other guys that they’ve been pushing up."

"in goods and services has expanded steadily over the past six decades thanks to declines in shipping and communication costs, globally negotiated reductions in government s, the widespread outsourcing of production activities, and a greater awareness of foreign cultures and products. New and better communications technologies, notably the Internet, have revolutionized the way people in all countries obtain and exchange information."

"More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response. These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems."

"This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

"When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the , in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known , in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy—s, a firm commitment to —helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are—and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times."

"I do not think this is a permanent condition. The craziness comes more from cultural ethnic issues than anything else, because you have a… A lot of the real craziness come from, if you like, from rural who feel that they’re losing their country, they’re losing ownership of the country. And they are right—we are becoming more diverse, more multicultural. And in the end... they are not the future. In the end, the power they still have will go away. But it’s a very difficult time until then. So the future is Mayor Deblasio of New York, but Ted Cruz is still out there with the ability to do a lot of damage."

"Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology. Why is economics such a hard subject? Part of the answer has to do with complexity. The economy cannot be put in a box. [...] Another reason economics is hard is that the critical sociologist is right: it involves human beings, who do not behave in simple, mechanical ways."

"As the example of Ronald Reagan shows, real political success comes not simply from appealing to the interests that people currently perceive but from finding ways to redefine their perceived interests, to harness their discontent in favor of changes that you can lead."

"Why did the magic economy go away? Hundreds of books have been written on that topic. This isn't one of them ― although I'll devote part of a chapter to some plausible stories and take a number of stabs at the issue along the way. But let me cut to the chase: the real answer is that we don't know. There are a lot of stories out there. Most of them, including the ones that have achieved the widest currency, are dead wrong on logical or factual grounds. There are some less popular stories that could be right ― but if you are honest with yourself, you will admit that nobody, yourself included, knows which if any of these stories actually is right."

"Where do ideas about economics come from? They come, of course from economists—where by an "economist" I mean someone who thinks and writes regularly about economic issues. But not all economists are alike, and in fact the genus includes two radically distinct species: The professors and the policy entrepreneurs."

"No, the problem that the politicians have with the professors is not one of failure to communicate; it is one of failure to say what politicians want (need) to hear, especially when they are trying to seize power from other politicians. And necessity is the mother of invention: a different group, the policy entrepreneurs, has arisen to fill the gap."

"There are many economic puzzles, but there are only two really great mysteries. One of these mysteries is why economic growth takes places at different rates over time and across countries. Nobody really knows why the U.S. economy could generate 3 percent annual productivity growth before 1973 but only 1 percent afterward, nobody really knows why Japan surged from defeat to global economic power after World War II, while Britain slid slowly into third-rate status. At any given time there are always policy entrepreneurs willing to claim that they have all the answers, but we'll come to that story in later chapters. The other mystery is the reason why there is a business cycle ― the irregular rhythm of recessions and recoveries that prevents economic growth from being a smooth trend. It was in challenging the orthodox, Keynesian view of business cycles that conservatives first forced a major rethinking of economics."

"The phenomenon of recessions puzzled many economists in the early years of this century, and led many of them produce their worst work. Thorstein Veblen went from his brilliant Theory of the Leisure Class to write a really terrible book (') purporting to explain economic slumps. Joseph Schumpeter, whose magnificent vision of the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalist growth continues to inspire many economists, wrote a turgid, almost meaningless two-volume study, Business Cycles. Marxists gleefully seized upon the biggest recession of all, the Great Depression of the 1930s, as evidence of the irrationality of capitalism; yet they never offered a good explanation of why and how such things happen, just assurances that socialism would cure them. It fell to the British economist John Maynard Keynes to provide a clear story about what happens during a recession, and some useful advice about how to get out of one."

"The usual and basic Keynesian answer to recessions is a monetary expansion. But Keynes worried that even this might sometimes not be enough, particularly if a recession had been allowed to get out of hand and become a true depression. Once the economy is deeply depressed, households and especially firms may be unwilling to increase spending no matter how much cash they have, they may simply add any monetary expansion to their board. Such a situation, in which monetary policy has become ineffective, has come to be known as a ""; Keynes believed that the British and American economies had entered such a trap by the mid-1930s, and some economists believed that the United States was on the edge of such a trap in 1992. The Keynesian answer to a liquidity trap is for the government to do what the private sector will not: spend. When monetary expansion is ineffective, fiscal expansion—such as public works programs financed by borrowing—must take its place. Such a fiscal expansion can break the vicious circle of low spending and low incomes, "priming the pump: and getting the economy moving again. But remember that this is not by any means an all-purpose policy recommendation; it is essentially a strategy of desperation, a dangerous drug to be prescribed only when the usual over-the-counter remedy of monetary policy has failed."

"Like any major intellectual contribution, Keynes's ideas were bitterly criticized. To many people it seems obvious that massive economic slumps must have deep roots. To them, Keynes's argument that they are essentially no more than a problem of mixed signals, which can be cured by printing a bit more money, seems unbelievable."

"The first stage of Friedman's attack on Keynes was his effective though somewhat slippery critique of the idea that monetary and fiscal policy can be actively used to smooth out the business cycle. Friedman argued that such active policy is not only unnecessary but actually harmful, worsening the very economic instability that it is supposed to correct, and should be replaced by simple, mechanical monetary rules. This is the doctrine that came to be known as "monetarism.""

"On the whole, the monetarism for which Friedman first became famous seems clever, brilliantly argued, but shallow ― and perhaps even a bit disingenuous. Friedman's writings from that period have the feel of a smart man who knows what he wants to believe looking hard for supporting arguments. And I think it is fair to say that up until the late 1960s Friedman and his followers, while influential, were regarded by many of their colleagues as faintly disreputable."

"Milton Friedman was not surprised. In 1968, in one of the decisive intellectual achievements of postwar economics, Friedman not only showed why the apparent tradeoff embodied in the idea of the Phillips curve was wrong; he also predicted the emergence of combined inflation and high unemployment, which Paul Samuelson dubbed ".""

"Feldstein pointed out that throughout the tax system inflation was turning tolerable paper tax rates into very high effective rates. Corporations, for example, were supposed to pay a tax rate of 42 percent on their profits. Feldstein calculated, however, that when the effects of inflation were taken into account, the true tax on any profits from investing in equipment was more like 75 percent. You don't need to be a Republican to accept that tax rates this high might discourage investment and hurt economic growth. But was the interaction between inflation and investment really a major villain in America's economic difficulties? There the evidence was less clear."

"By 1980, the work of Feldstein, Boskin, Summers, and others had convinced many economists that U.S. taxes were in fact a significant obstacle to investment. Nor was this all: another major U.S. policy, the Social Security system, was also discouraging saving and investment."

"In the world of politics, however, the actual content of an academic movement may be less important than the way it affects the tone of the discussion. During the 1970s there was a growing public sense of disillusionment with government, which first fed grass-roots tax revolts in California and , then helped elect Ronald Reagan. And there was also a determined effort by a few extremely conservative journalists and politicians to promote radical tax-cutting plans. No matter how careful the research of conservative public finance theorists like Martin Feldstein might be, in that political climate it was inevitable that it would be widely seen as basically confirming popular prejudices. There was a huge intellectual gulf between Feldstein or Boskin and the sweeping claims of Arthur Laffer; but in the public mind, they were in effect allies."

"In a way, the worst sin of the conservatives was that of hypocrisy. They proclaimed growth as their objective, offered it as the answer to all problems, all while following policies that actually inhibited that growth at least a bit. At the end of the day, however, the most striking fact is how little happened to U.S. long-term growth, good or bad, on their watch."

"In the court of conventional wisdom, Ronald Reagan stands accused of inflicting a huge burden of debt upon his country. He cut taxes on the rich, increased military spending, and failed to cut enough spending elsewhere to pay for his largesse. The result was a string of unprecedented peacetime deficits, and a debt that will be a drag on the national for decades to come. Reagan is guilty as charged. The supply-side apologists' claim that some extraordinary economic success vindicates in spite of the deficits just doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence. The question, however, is whether the crime was a felony or a misdemeanor. The answer proposed here will not satisfy those with a taste for drama. Reagan created a deficit, and it hurt American economic growth. But even if the effects of the visible deficit are supplemented with appeals to several alleged hidden deficits of the 1980s, the cost was not catastrophic. The deficit is not nearly the monster some people imagine."

"The new trade theory picture of the world looks something like this: Each country has, at any given time, a set of broad resources—land, skilled labor, capital, climate, general technological competence. These resources define up to a point the industries in which the country can hope to be competitive on world markets. [...] But a country's resources do not fully determine what it produces, because the detailed pattern of advantage reflects the self-reinforcing virtuous circles, set in motion by the vagaries of history."

"It's tempting to give up—either to retreat to the ivory tower, or to start to play the policy entrepreneur game. After all, what is the use of sophisticated policy thinking or careful examination of the facts if simplistic ideas win every time? One answer is simply that it would be wrong to give up. If the people with good ideas do not fight for them, they have no right to complain about the outcome. But good ideas will still often lose to convenient nonsense. When that happens, every serious economist is ultimately sustained by a faith that the right ideas will eventually prevail."

"Economists, like everyone, have their political es, but these are by no means as strong an influence on what they are willing to consider as you might think. For example, one might have thought that strongly liberal economists like, say, James Tobin would be at least mildly sympathetic to the views of radical economists who draw their inspiration from Marx, or of heterodox economic thinkers like Galbraith. After all, in such fields as history and sociology the Marxist or post-Marxist left has long received a respectful hearing. And yet you don't find this happening: liberal economists are almost as quick as their conservative colleagues to condemn heterodox leftist ideas as foolish—it was the liberal Robert Solow, not Milton Friedman, who defended orthodoxy in the bitter "capital controversy" with British radicals."

"Consider John Kenneth Galbraith or Lester Thurow, both leading economists in the view of the general public, both with all the formal qualifications, both totally ignored by the academic mainstream. Or consider Robert Mundell, who is still revered for his contributions to international monetary theory, yet whose later incarnation as the father of supply-side economics has similarly been ignored."

"In the last few years it has become apparent that during the 1940s and 1950s, a core of ideas emerged regarding external economies, strategic complementarity, and that remains intellectually valid and may continue to have practical applications. This set of ideas which I will refer to as "high " — anticipated in a number of ways the cutting edge of modern trade and growth theory. But these ideas have had to be rediscovered. Between 1960 and 1980 high development theory was virtually buried, essentially because the founders of development economics failed to make their points with sufficient analytical clarity to communicate their essence to other economists, and perhaps even to each other. Only recently have changes in economics made it possible to reconsider what the development theorists said, and to regain the valuable ideas that have been lost."

"A casual reading of the development literature suggests that there is a dividing line circa 1960. Before 1960 writers on development generally assumed as a matter of course that economies of scale were a limiting factor on the ability to profitably establish industries in less developed countries, and that in the presence of such economies of scale pecuniary external economies assume real welfare significance. They seem, however, to have been unaware of the degree to which economies of scale raise problems for explicit modeling of competition, and/or of the extent to which the drive for formalism was pushing economics toward explicit models. After 1960, by contrast, economists working on development had been trained in the formalism of constant-returns general equilibrium, and did not so much reject the possibility that economies of scale might matter, as simply fail to notice it."

"In this part of the lecture I have argued that a number of works in development economics written during the 1950s contained, more or less explicitly and more or less self-consciously, a theory in which strategic complementarity played a key role in development: external economies arose from a circular relationship in which the decision to invest in large-scale production depended on the size of the market, and the size of the market depended on the decision to invest. Whatever the practical relevance of this theory, it made perfectly good logical sense. Yet this was subsequently abandoned, to such an extent that classic papers in the field began to seem, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say, "not even wrong" — simply incomprehensible."

"From the point of view of a modern economist, the most striking feature of the works of high is their adherence to a discursive, nonmathematical style. Economics has, of course, become vastly more mathematical over time. Nonetheless, development economics was archaic in style even for its own time. Of the four most famous high development works, Rosenstein-Rodan's was approximately contemporary with Samuelson's formulation of the Heckscher–Ohlin model, while Lewis, Myrdal, and Hirschman were all roughly contemporary with Solow's initial statement of growth theory. This lack of formality was not because development economists were peculiarly mathematically incapable. Hirschman made a significant contribution to the formal theory of in the 1940s, while Fleming helped create the still influential of s. Moreover, the development field itself was at the same time generating mathematical planning models—first Harrod–Domar type growth models, then linear programming approaches that were actually quite technically advanced for their time. So why didn't high development theory get expressed in formal models? Almost certainly for one basic reason: the difficulty of reconciling economies of scale with a competitive market structure."

"The irony... is that high development theory was right. By this I do not mean that the Big Push is really the right story of how development takes place, or even that the issues raised in high development theory are necessarily the key ones for making poor countries rich. What I do mean is that the unconventional themes put forth by the high development theorists—their emphasis on strategic complementarity in investment decisions and on the problem of coordination failure—did... identify important possibilities that are neglected in models. But the high development theorists failed to convince their colleagues of the importance of those possibilities. Worse, they failed even to communicate clearly what they were talking about. And so good ideas, important ideas, were ignored for a generation..."

"The history of of the study of the location of economic activity is more like the story of geological thought about the shapes and location of continents and mountain ranges. The location of production is an obvious feature of the economic world. Indeed, I began to get interested in economics as a schoolchild by looking at those old-fashioned maps of countries that used picturesque symbols to represent economic activity: sheaves of wheat to represent agriculture, little miners' carts to represent resource extraction, little factories to represent industry, and so on. And yet there is almost no spatial analysis in mainstream economics."

"So why did spatial issues remain a blind spot for the economic profession? It was not a historical accident: there was something about spatial economics that made it inherently unfriendly terrain for the kind of modeling mainstream economists know how to do. That something was, as you might well guess, the problem of in the face of increasing returns, a problem that is even more acute in than in . In development the crucial role that high assigned to increasing returns was a hypothesis crucial to that doctrine, but not necessarily crucial to understanding development in general. One could do meaningful theorizing about developing countries, albeit not in the grand tradition, without sacrificing the convenient assumptions of constant returns and perfect competition. In spatial economics, however, you really cannot get started at all without finding a way to deal with scale economies and oligopolistic firms."

"So what's the moral? We've seen how the insistence on models that meet the standards of rigor in mainstream economics can lead to neglect of clearly valuable ideas. Does this mean that the whole emphasis on models is wrong? Should we make a major effort to open up economics, to relax our standards about what constitutes an acceptable argument? No—the moral of my tale is nowhere near that easy. Economists can often be remarkably obtuse, failing to see things that are right in front of them. But sometimes a bit of obtuseness is not entirely a bad thing."

"Homo economicus is an implausible caricature, but a highly productive one, and no useful alternative has yet been found."

"Many of those who reject the idea of economic models are ill-informed or even (perhaps unconsciously) intellectually dishonest. Still, there are highly intelligent and objective thinkers who are repelled by simplistic models for a much better reason: they are very aware that the act of building a involves loss as well as gain."

"The problem is that there is no alternative to models. We all think in simplified models, all the time. The sophisticated thing to do is not to pretend to stop, but to be self-conscious—to be aware that your models are maps rather than reality."

"A temporary evolution of ignorance, a period when our insistence on looking in certain directions leaves us unable to see what is right under our noses, may be the price of progress, an inevitable part of what happens when we try to make sense of the world's complexity."

"Any interesting model of must exhibit a tension between two kinds of forces: "centripetal" forces that tend to pull economic activity into agglomerations, and "centrifugal" forces that tend to break up such agglomerations or limit their size."

"Whose fault is the replacement of serious discussion of world trade by what I have come to think of as "pop internationalism"? To some extent, of course, it is the result of basic human instincts: intellectual laziness, even among those who would be seen as wise and deep, will always be a powerful force. To some extent it also reflects the decline in the influence of economists in general: the high prestige of the profession a generation ago had much to do with the presumed effectiveness of Keynesian macroeconomic policies, and has suffered greatly as macroeconomics has dissolved into squabbling factions. And one should not ignore the role of editors, who often prefer what pop internationalists have to say to the disturbingly difficult ideas of people who know how to read national accounts or understand that the trade balance is also the difference between savings and investment. Indeed, some important editors, like James Fallows at The Atlantic or Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect are pop internationalists themselves; they deliberately use their magazines as platforms for what amounts to an anti-intellectual crusade."

"The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets."

"This article makes three points. First, it argues that concerns about competitiveness are, as an empirical matter, almost completely unfounded. Second, it tries to explain why defining the economic problem as one of international competition is nonetheless so attractive to so many people. Finally, it argues that the obsession with competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and threatening the international economic system."

"To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy, a government wedded to the ideology of competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to the theory of evolution."

"So let's start telling the truth: competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies. And the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous."

"First, most of the speculation about the superiority of the communist system - including the popular view that Western economies could painlessly accelerate their own growth by borrowing some aspects of that system - was off base. Rapid growth was based entirely on one attribute: the willingness to save, to sacrifice current consumption for the sake of future production. The communist example offered no hint of a free lunch. Second, the economic analysis of communist countries' growth implied some future limits to their industrial expansion - in other words, implied that a naive projection of their past growth rates into the future was likely to greatly overstate their real prospects. Economic growth that is based on expansion of inputs, rather than on growth in output per unit of input, is inevitably subject to diminishing returns. It was simply not possible for the Soviet economies to sustain the rates of growth of labor force participation, average education levels, and above all the physical capital stock that had prevailed in previous years. Communist growth would predictably slow down, perhaps drastically."

"If growth in East Asia is indeed running into diminishing returns, however, the conventional wisdom about an Asian-centered world economy needs some rethinking."

"That's a hard answer to accept, especially for those American policy intellectuals who recoil from the dreary task of reducing deficits and raising the national savings rate. But economics is not a dismal science because the economists like it that way; it is because in the end we must submit to the tyranny not just of the numbers, but of the logic they express."

"In this book I try to show how models of self-organization can be applied to many economic phenomena - how the principle of "order from instability," which explains the growth of hurricanes and embryos, can also explain the formation of cities and business cycles; how the principle of "order from random growth" can explain the strangely simple rules that describe the sizes of earth quakes, meteorites, and metropolitan areas. I believe that the ideas of self-organization theory can add substantially to our understanding of the economy; whatever their ultimate usefulness, these ideas are very exciting, and playing around with them is tremendous fun."

"The world is full of self-organizing systems, systems that form structures not merely in response to inputs from outside but also, indeed primarily, in response to their own internal logic. Global weather is a self-organizing system; so, surely, is the global economy."

"There are three kinds of writing in economics: Greek-letter, up-and-down, and airport. Greek-letter writing formal, theoretical, mathematical is how professors communicate. Like any academic field, economics has its fair share of hacks and phonies, who use complicated language to hide the banality of their ideas; it also contains profound thinkers, who use the specialized language of the discipline as an efficient way to express deep insights. [...] Up-and-down economics is what one encounters on the business pages of newspapers, or for that matter on TV. It is preoccupied with the latest news and the latest numbers, hence its name. [...] Finally, airport economics is the language of economics bestsellers. These books are most prominently displayed at airport bookstores, where the delayed business traveler is likely to buy them. Most of these books predict disaster: a new great depression, the evisceration of our economy by Japanese multinationals, the collapse of our money. A minority have the opposite view, a boundless optimism: new technology or supply-side economics is about to lead us into an era of unprecedented economic progress. Whether pessimistic or optimistic, airport economics is usually fun, rarely well informed, and never serious."

"Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker."

"The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them."

"The legend of King Midas has been generally misunderstood. Most people think the curse that turned everything the old miser touched into gold, leaving him unable to eat or drink, was a lesson in the perils of avarice. But Midas’s true sin was his failure to understand monetary economics. What the gods were really telling him is that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange—a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance."

"Will the tax cut destroy America’s prosperity? Probably not. As Adam Smith observed, there’s a deal of ruin in a nation. We have a huge, resilient economy that can survive and recover from even quite bad government policies. Yet while the tax cut may not be a matter of economic life or death, it is a very serious issue. For one thing, like it or not, the tax cut has become the central political issue in the United States right now. Conservatives who want to reshape America view passage of a large tax cut as a first step toward realizing their vision. For that reason, those who do not share this vision feel, rightly, that they must oppose the plan."

"To be a progressive, then, means being a partisan—at least for now. The only way a progressive agenda can be enacted is if Democrats have both the presidency and a large enough majority in Congress to overcome Republican opposition. And achieving that kind of political preponderance will require leadership that makes opponents of the progressive agenda pay a political price for their obstructionism—leadership that, like FDR, welcomes the hatred of the interest groups trying to prevent us from making our society better."

"I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it."

"Most economists, to the extent that they think about the subject at all, regard the Great Depression of the 1930s as a gratuitous, unnecessary tragedy."

"The kind of economic trouble that Asia experienced a decade ago, and that we're all experiencing now, is precisely the sort of thing we thought we had learned to prevent. In the bad old days big, advanced economies with stable governments-like Britain in the 1920s-might have had no answer to prolonged periods of stagnation and deflation; but between John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, we thought we knew enough to keep that from happening again."

"At the time, I thought of it this way: it was as if bacteria that used to cause deadly plagues, but had long been considered conquered by modem medicine, had reemerged in a form resistant to all the standard antibiotics. Here's what I wrote in the introduction to the first edition: "So far only a limited number of people have actually fallen prey to the newly incurable strains; but even those of us who have so far been lucky would be foolish not to seek new cures, new prophylactic regimens, whatever it takes, lest we tum out to be the next victims." Well, we were foolish. And now the plague is upon us."

"For the first time since 1917, then, we live in a world in which property rights and free markets are viewed as fundamental principles, not grudging expedients; where the unpleasant aspects of a market system—inequality, unemployment, injustice—are accepted as facts of life. As in the Victorian era, capitalism is secure not only because of its successes—which, as we will see in a moment, have been very real—but because nobody has a plausible alternative. This situation will not last forever. Surely there will be other ideologies, other dreams; and they will emerge sooner rather than later if the current economic crisis persists and deepens. But for now capitalism rules the world unchallenged."

"In retrospect it is also clear that we gave far too much credit to “Washington,” to the IMF and the Treasury. It was true that they had acted courageously and decisively, and that the results had been a vindication. But on close examination the omens were not all that good for a repeat performance. For one thing, the mobilization of money was achieved through what amounted to a legal sleight of hand, justified mainly by the special significance of Mexico to U.S. interests. Money would not come as quickly or as easily in later crises. The Mexican rescue was also made less complicated by the cooperation of the Mexican government: Zedillo’s people had no pride to swallow—not with Mexico’s history—and were in complete agreement with Washington about what needed to be done. Dealing with Asian countries that had been accustomed to negotiating from a position of strength, and with Asian leaders accustomed to having things their own way, would be very different. Perhaps most of all, we failed to understand the extent to which both Mexico and Washington simply got lucky. The rescue wasn’t really a well-considered plan that addressed the essence of the crisis: it was an emergency injection of cash to a beleaguered government, which did its part by adopting painful measures less because they were clearly related to the economic problems than because by demonstrating the government’s seriousness they might restore market confidence. They succeeded, albeit only after the economy had been punished severely, but there was no good reason to suppose that such a strategy would work the next time."

"Indeed, there has long been a strand of thought that says that moderate inflation may be necessary if monetary policy is to be able to fight recessions. Still, advocates of inflation have had to contend with a deep-seated sense that stable prices are always desirable, that to promote inflation is to create perverse and dangerous incentives. This belief in the importance of price stability is not based on standard economic models—on the contrary, the usual textbook theory, when applied to Japan’s unusual circumstances, points directly to inflation as the natural solution. But conventional economic theory and conventional economic wisdom are not always the same thing—a conflict that would become increasingly apparent as one country after another found itself having to make hard choices in the face of financial crisis."

"Were the Asian economies more vulnerable to financial panic in 1997 than they had been, say, five or ten years before? Yes, surely—but not because of crony capitalism, or indeed what would usually be considered bad government policies. Rather, they had become more vulnerable partly because they had opened up their financial markets—because they had, in fact, become better free-market economies, not worse. And they had also grown vulnerable because they had taken advantage of their new popularity with international lenders to run up substantial debts to the outside world. These debts intensified the feedback from loss of confidence to financial collapse and back again, making the vicious circle of crisis more intense. It wasn’t that the money was badly spent; some of it was, some of it wasn’t. It was that the new debts, unlike the old ones, were in dollars—and that turned out to be the economies’ undoing."

"Here’s what the IMF did: In Asia (as opposed to Brazil, which as I said was a sort of caricature of the Asian programs) it did not tell countries to defend the values of their currencies at all cost. But it did tell them to raise interest rates, initially to very high levels, in an attempt to persuade investors to keep their money in place. Some vociferous critics of the IMF—most notably Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs—said that this was very much the wrong thing to do. Sachs believed, in effect, that Asian countries could and should have behaved like Australia, simply letting their currencies decline until they started to look cheap to investors, and that if they had done so, the great slump would never have happened. What the IMF said in response is that Asia is not Australia: that to let the currencies fall unchecked would have led to “hyperdevaluations,” and that the result would have been both massive financial distress (because so many businesses had debt denominated in dollars) and soaring inflation. The trouble with this rationale is, of course, that the massive financial distress happened anyway, thanks to high interest rates and the recession they helped cause. So the IMF at best avoided one vicious circle only by starting another."

"It is important to realize that even now Fed officials are not quite sure how they pulled this rescue off. At the height of the crisis it seemed entirely possible that cutting interest rates would be entirely ineffectual—after all, if nobody can borrow, what difference does it make what the price would be if they could? And if everyone had believed that the world was coming to an end, their panic might—as in so many other countries—have ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. In retrospect Greenspan seemed to have been like a general who rides out in front of his demoralized army waves his sword and shouts encouragement, and somehow turns the tide of battle: well done, but not something you would want to count on working next time."

"As I’ve just noted, Greenspan warned about irrational exuberance, but he didn’t do anything about it. And in fact, the Fed chairman holds what I believe is a unique record among central bankers: he presided over not one but two enormous asset bubbles, first in stocks, then in housing."

"But this warning was ignored, and there was no move to extend regulation. On the contrary, the spirit of the times—and the ideology of the George W. Bush administration—was deeply antiregulation. This attitude was symbolized by a photo-op held in 2003, in which representatives of the various agencies that play roles in bank oversight used pruning shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of regulations. More concretely, the Bush administration used federal power, including obscure powers of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, to block state-level efforts to impose some oversight on subprime lending."

"We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men."

"Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models—for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works."

"As is often the case with major disputes in economics, the argument over fiscal policy went on for years, with some critics of fiscal policy still defending their position when this book went to press. It seems fair, however, to say that among economists a more or less Keynesian view of the effects of fiscal policy came to prevail. Careful statistical studies at the International Monetary Fund and else where showed that austerity policies have historically been followed by contraction, not expansion. Recent experience, in which countries like Spain and Greece that were forced into severe austerity also experienced severe slumps, seemed to confirm that observation. Furthermore, it was clear that those who had predicted a sharp rise in U.S. interest rates due to budget deficits, leading to conventional crowding out, had been wrong: U.S. long-term interest rates remained near record lows even during the years from 2009 to 2012, when the government ran very large deficits."

"Even when political action doesn't backfire, when the movement gets what it wants, the effects are often startlingly malign. For example, could anything be worse than having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution. The point is that third-world countries aren't poor because their export workers earn low wages; it's the other way around. Because the countries are poor, even what look to us like bad jobs at bad wages are almost always much better than the alternatives: millions of Mexicans are migrating to the north of the country to take the low-wage export jobs that outrage opponents of Nafta. And those jobs wouldn't exist if the wages were much higher: the same factors that make poor countries poor -- low productivity, bad infrastructure, general social disorganization -- mean that such countries can compete on world markets only if they pay wages much lower than those paid in the West."

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging."

"What saved the economy, and the New Deal was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs."

"When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right."

"I do not think that word “compromise” means what Mr. Ryan thinks it means. Above all, he failed to offer the one thing the White House won’t, can’t bend on: an end to extortion over the debt ceiling. Yet even this ludicrously unbalanced offer was too much for conservative activists, who lambasted Mr. Ryan for basically leaving health reform intact.Does this mean that we’re going to hit the debt ceiling? Quite possibly; nobody really knows, but careful observers are giving no better than even odds that any kind of deal will be reached before the money runs out. Beyond that, however, our current state of dysfunction looks like a chronic condition, not a one-time event. Even if the debt ceiling is raised enough to avoid immediate default, even if the government shutdown is somehow brought to an end, it will only be a temporary reprieve. Conservative activists are simply not willing to give up on the idea of ruling through extortion, and the Obama administration has decided, wisely, that it will not give in to extortion.So how does this end? How does America become governable again?"

"Things could have been even worse. This week, we managed to avoid driving off a cliff. But we’re still on the road to nowhere."

"Many liberals have changed their views in response to new evidence. It’s an interesting experience; conservatives should try it some time."

"Holding people accountable for their past is O.K., but imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys, isn’t. Abraham Lincoln didn’t meet that standard; neither did F.D.R. Nor, for that matter, has Bernie Sanders (think guns)."

"The Sanders campaign has brought out a lot of idealism and energy that the progressive movement needs. It has also, however, brought out a streak of petulant self-righteousness among some supporters. Has it brought out that streak in the candidate, too?"

"If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never."

"The fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward."

"Nobody can credibly promise to bring the old jobs back; what you can promise — and Mrs. Clinton did — are things like guaranteed health care and higher minimum wages. But working-class whites overwhelmingly voted for politicians who promise to destroy those gains."

"You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay County as a response to disagreements about trade policy. The only way to make sense of what happened is to see the vote as an expression of, well, identity politics — some combination of white resentment at what voters see as favoritism toward nonwhites (even though it isn’t) and anger on the part of the less educated at liberal elites whom they imagine look down on them."

"Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem."

"With great wealth comes great pettiness."

"Nonetheless, William Barr — again, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, responsible for defending the Constitution — is sounding remarkably like America’s most unhinged religious zealots, the kind of people who insist that we keep experiencing mass murder because schools teach the theory of evolution. Guns don’t kill people — Darwin kills people!"

"The [Trump impeachment] inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery."

"The way to deal with China would have been a broad coalition of countries that play by the rules. Instead, we've conveyed the message that big countries don't need no rules. And China is a very big country."

"Republicans Add Insult to Illness"

"Because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis."

"If Keynes was Luther, Friedman was Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. And like the Jesuits, Friedman’s followers have acted as a sort of disciplined army of the faithful, spearheading a broad, but incomplete, rollback of Keynesian heresy. By the century’s end, classical economics had regained much though by no means all of its former dominion, and Friedman deserves much of the credit."

"Keynesian theory initially prevailed because it did a far better job than classical orthodoxy of making sense of the world around us, and Friedman’s critique of Keynes became so influential largely because he correctly identified Keynesianism’s weak points. And just to be clear: although this essay argues that Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man."

"Keynes didn’t make an all-out assault on Economic Man, but he often resorted to plausible psychological theorizing rather than careful analysis of what a rational decision-maker would do. Business decisions were driven by “animal spirits,” consumer decisions by a psychological tendency to spend some but not all of any increase in income, wage settlements by a sense of fairness, and so on. But was it really a good idea to diminish the role of Economic Man that much? No, said Friedman, who argued in his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” that economic theories should be judged not by their psychological realism but by their ability to predict behavior. And Friedman’s two greatest triumphs as an economic theorist came from applying the hypothesis of rational behavior to questions other economists had thought beyond its reach."

"One interesting footnote: although Friedman made great strides in macroeconomics by applying the concept of individual rationality, he also knew where to stop. In the 1970s, some economists pushed Friedman’s analysis of inflation even further, arguing that there is no usable trade-off between inflation and unemployment even in the short run, because people will anticipate government actions and build that anticipation, as well as past experience, into their price-setting and wage-bargaining. This doctrine, known as “rational expectations,” swept through much of academic economics. But Friedman never went there."

"In effect, Japan in the Nineties offered a fresh opportunity to test the views of Friedman and Keynes regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. And the results clearly supported Keynes’s pessimism rather than Friedman’s optimism."

"What’s odd about Friedman’s absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist’s economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn’t he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual? The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy. In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there’s a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation."

"Equally important, the financial industry’s political power has not gone away. Banks have waged a fierce campaign against what many expected to be an easily passed reform proposal, the creation of a new agency to protect financial consumers. Despite the steady drumbeat of scandalous revelations—most recently, the discovery that Goldman Sachs helped Greece cook its books, while Lehman cooked its own books—top financial executives continue to have ready access to the corridors of power. And as many have noted, President Obama’s chief economic and financial officials are men closely associated with Clinton-era deregulation and financial triumphalism; they may have revised their views but the continuity remains striking. In that sense, this time really is different: while the first great global financial crisis was followed by major reforms, it’s not clear that anything comparable will happen after the second. And history tells us what will happen if those reforms don’t take place. There will be a resurgence of financial folly, which always flourishes given a chance. And the consequence of that folly will be more and quite possibly worse crises in the years to come."

"Piketty ends Capital in the Twenty-First Century with a call to arms — a call, in particular, for wealth taxes, global if possible, to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth. It’s easy to be cynical about the prospects for anything of the kind. But surely Piketty’s masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading makes such a thing considerably more likely. So Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to."

"We’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed."

"The best you can say about economic policy in this slump is that we have for the most part avoided a full repeat of the Great Depression. I say “for the most part” because we actually are seeing a Depression-level slump in Greece, and very bad slumps elsewhere in the European periphery. Still, the overall downturn hasn’t been a full 1930s replay. But all of that, I think, can be attributed to the financial rescue of 2008-2009 and automatic stabilizers. Deliberate policy to offset the crash in private spending has been largely absent."

"Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD."

"We’re now in the seventh year of a slump brought on by Wall Street excess; the wizardly job of “allocating the economy’s investment resources” consisted, we now know, largely of funneling money into a real estate bubble."

"I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond. 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain. 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down. 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses."

"It has been obvious for quite a while that Sanders — not just his supporters, not even just his surrogates, but the candidate himself — has a problem both in facing reality and in admitting mistakes."

"As Branko says, there was a time when Serbs and Croats seemed to get along fairly well, indeed intermarrying at a high rate. But could anyone now put Yugoslavia back together? At this rate, we’ll soon be asking the same question about America."

"What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot."

"Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur ("The Legend of Arthur") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in hightech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was "just pissed off," not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows."

"Critics of Paul Krugman call him acerbic and boastful, unfair on the attack and unwilling to make concessions on the defense, certain that he is correct, and always sure that those who disagree are mendacious or foolish (or both). And I cannot deny that these criticisms are accurate. But all these are outweighed by one fact: he is almost always--not always, but almost always--right. He is the closest thing to an heir to John Maynard Keynes we have today."

"Krugman is right about democracy in a sense: Democracy is essentially one big organized act of bullying whereby a larger group bullies a smaller group in order to plunder it with taxes. The “Civil War” proved that whenever a smaller group has finally had enough, and attempts to leave the game, the larger group will resort to anything—even the mass murder of hundreds of thousands and the bombing and burning of entire cities—to get its way. After all, in his first inaugural address Lincoln literally threatened “force,” “invasion,” and “bloodshed” (his exact words) in any state that refused to pay the federal tariff , which had just been more than doubled two days earlier. He followed through with his threat. This is “the kind of nation I believe in,” says Paul Krugman on his blog."

"I was just reading an excellent and appropriately approving account of your work. It tells of those who vigorously oppose. My admiration and my personal reward from what you do has no qualification, so it is with all those I wittingly know. Do realize that this is your worthwhile majority and that dissenters are an essential proof of your merit. I should be clear: your column is the best regular reading on economics and politics that I’ve encountered over the last seventy-five years and even a few more."

"I cannot forbear to lengthen an already long paper by adding some remarks about what Paul Krugman calls the "new international economics" (Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics, MIT paperback, 1986) and "new trade theory" (in "New Trade Theory and the Less Developed Countries," a paper submitted to the Carlos F. Diaz-Alejandro memorial conference held in Helsinki, August 23-5, 1986). The "new" theory rests on economies of scale. As I told Krugman at Helsinki, I find it a bizarre notion that increasing returns in international trade are new. I developed it at length in my 1953 textbook, based on the 1929 article of John Williams, reprinted in the AEA, "Readings in the Theory of International Trade." Jan Tinbergen developed it in his textbook, International Economic Integration (1954). I recall the joy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Kenneth Arrow made increasing returns respectable by formalizing Alfred Marshall's description of long-run decreasing costs historically with his paper on "Learning by Doing," a paper rapidly incorporated into international-trade theory by those who need formal models to understand the intuitively obvious. I confess to some irritation over Krugman's defense of his international-trade theory as new because it offers a well-worn truth in equation form."

"Like clockwork every election cycle: Krugman forgets everything he wrote about inequality and legalized corruption in Washington, sides w/ the candidate most likely to give him a power job, and screams at the left for doing what primaries are supposed to do: vet the candidates."

"Krugman [...] was not cheerfully advocating a housing bubble, but instead he was glumly saying that the only way he could see to get out of the recession would be for such a bubble to occur."

"As was the case with Smith's original observations on specialization and market size, we shall need a tractable analytical framework to make progress on this issue. The two Helpman and Krugman monographs have amply shown that when Smith's ideas are developed within a clear theoretical framework, they contain some surprising implications. They are, I think, outstanding illustrations of why we work to construct useful, explicit theories rather than being content with good rules of thumb."

"Paul Krugman has been doing a lot of very effective writing attacking non-economists writing about economic matters. Paul is speaking for the whole profession in a very effective way and addressing the most important questions in social science."

"Despite its flaws, Peddling Prosperity has much to recommend it. There is no book written for a lay audience that explains the economics profession with more perception or clarity than this one."

"I grew to understand how the Chicago School argued, and I can do it myself, but they were lying about how they arrived at their conclusions. I could see that they were obviously lying, but I was just annoyed and shocked that they continued to lie about how they got to the questions that they got to. And then it gradually occurred to me that if this is true, then maybe the whole profession is lying, and that belief has gotten stronger as I have gotten older. People say, "We do econometrics, and that tests our hypotheses." Baloney. We do theory. I was just rereading last night Paul Krugman's famous article where he tries to introduce geographical considerations into economics, and it is a very skillfully done article. It's rhetorically very skillful. I can show you how it works rhetorically, but it is complete nonsense scientifically, not because it is wrong but because it is arbitrary. There are a zillion other ways of formalizing geography in economics that would come to opposite conclusions to those he comes to, and yet he's kind of airily saying that this is a contribution. Then there are a thousand other articles modifying that. It doesn't get anywhere: they modify it and get completely different conclusions. If you change your assumptions, you get different theorems. So the whole exercise, it gradually dawned on me, was complete nonsense, so that's what turned me. But it is unfair and kind of stupid to say that I stopped doing economics."

"Paul Krugman is a respected trade theorist. But he does not speak authoritatively on subjects on which he has no expertise. Monetary economics is not his field of expertise. Krugman’s research background does not qualify him as an authority on Milton Friedman’s work. … Friedman’s reputation is intact despite Krugman’s deplorable efforts to denigrate him and his contributions."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) ...Because of “The Daily Show,” most of my reading time these days is consumed by journalists. Paul Krugman is always great. ..."

"I am proud of my generation of policy economists. You know their names: Walter Heller, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Okun, Herbert Stein, Peter Drucker, and many more. But, as some sage has said, science progresses funeral by funeral. Paul Krugman is the rising star of this century and the next, and the world beats a path to his door. International finance is his thing, but that is only one of the many strings to his fiddle. The World Bank, the IMF, the Bank of Japan, and the Boston Fed all seek to tap his fountain of wisdom and new ideas."

"If you grew up in the 80s you probably remember Voltron. Although the show often had convoluted plotlines, it would somehow always end with Voltron (a super-powerful robot formed from five mechanical lions) facing off against a monster called a "Robeast". Voltron had plenty of weapons, but he would invariably strike the killing blow with his "Blazing Sword". Eventually the show became kind of routine, but to a four-year-old, it was pure gold. In the econ blogosphere, a similar dynamic has played out over the last few years. Each week a Robeast will show up, bellowing predictions of inflation and/or soaring interest rates. And each week, Paul Krugman...I mean, KrugTron, Defender of the Blogoverse, will strike down the monster with a successful prediction of...low inflation and continued low interest rates. Goldbugs, "Austrians", New Classical economists, and harrumphing conservatives of all stripes have eagerly gone head-to-head with KrugTron in the prediction wars, and have been summarily cloven in twain."

"I was explaining Nordhaus’s work in a graduate course I was then teaching on the economic theory of natural resources. As a strong believer in economics as a handicraft industry, I mentioned, teasingly, to the class that this remarkable piece of work had been done by an extraordinarily powerful research apparatus, not to be undervalued by advocates of Big Economics: one professor and one undergraduate research assistant. When the class was over, one of the students came shyly up to me and said, “I was the undergraduate research assistant.” It turned out to be Paul Krugman. Teaching can be an unexpected pleasure."

"Until the emergence of Democrat leader John Kerry, Paul Krugman had virtually become the leader of the opposition in America, an unusual position for an academic economist."

"From conversations, I became convinced that people who counterfactual upwards (i.e., compare themselves to those richer) want to actively dispossess the rich. As with all communist movements, it is often the bourgeois or clerical classes who are the early adopters of revolutionary theories. So class envy doesn’t originate from a truck driver in South Alabama, but from a New York or Washington, D.C., Ivy League–educated IYI [Intellectual Yet Idiot] (say Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz) with a sense of entitlement, upset some “less smart” persons are much richer."

"New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote Wednesday that his computer had been hacked and that someone was "using it to download child pornography.""

"The shock therapy of decisive war against Iraq will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited. The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization. But to do all this, we must act."

"Either you believe in markets, or you believe in government."

"I think the housing boom is a tremendous plus."

"If stocks are optimistic, then so am I."

"Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity!"

"There ain't no recession."

"The Bush boom is alive and well. It's finishing up its sixth splendid year with many more years to come."

"What matters most for all Americans is economic growth. As Arthur Laffer frequently reminds us: Tax something more, get less of it. Tax something less, get more of it."

"We have contained this. I won't say airtight but pretty close to airtight."

"There is no second wave coming. It’s just hot spots. They send in CDC teams, we’ve got the testing procedures, we’ve got the diagnostics, we’ve got the PPE. And so I really think it’s a pretty good situation."

"Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy."

"Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures."

"I had my own mercury levels tested recently, Bill, and my levels are about three times what are considered safe, just from eating fish. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury would have children with cognitive impairment, with permanent brain damage, probably an IQ loss of 5 to 7 points... Under Clinton rules, they would have had to remove 90% of that mercury within three-and-a-half years. But this president, eight weeks ago, announced he was scrapping those rules and substituting rules that were written by industry lobbyists that will require that they never have to clean up. This is an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of people and directly impacts the health of millions and millions of Americans. But you don't see it in the newspaper. It should be the headlines every single day. But we don't know about it."

"The news departments have become corporate profit centers. And their only obligation now is to their shareholders. Which is to create large audiences and viewership so they can sell more ad space. So they're airing stories that appeal to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain: for sex and celebrity gossip. And now, for terror. So they give us Kobe Bryant and they give us Michael Jackson. And they give us Laci Peterson and they give us lots and lots of terror alerts. But they're not telling us the really critical stories that impact our way of life."

"[According to a specialist, an abnormality seen in his brain scans] was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died."

"[After the mercury poisoning (cited above)] I have cognitive problems, clearly [...] I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me."

"They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone [...] This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country."

"Thimerosal is a controversial mercury based (sic) vaccine preservative that research scientists and vaccine safety advocates have connected to the epidemic of brain disorders in children."

"My father believed moral courage to be the rarest species of bravery. Rarer even than the physical courage of soldiers in battle or great intelligence. He thought it the one vital quality required to salvage the world."

"Dr. Mikovits joined NIH in 1980 as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Molecular Virology at the National Cancer Institute and began a 20-year collaboration with Frank Ruscetti, a pioneer in the field of human retro virology. She helped Dr Russetti isolate the HIV virus and link it to #AIDS in 1983. Her NIH boss Anthony Fauci delayed publication of that critical paper for 6 months to let his protégé Robert Gallo replicate, publish and claim credit. The delay in mass HIV testing let AIDS further spread around the globe and helped Fauci win promotion to director NIAID... Appropriating her (Judy Mikovits') work wasn’t the worst of it. This delayed the development of testing and spread the HIV epidemic through the world, killing millions. Driven by greed and cronyism, Anthony Fauci—”America’s Doctor”—is directly responsible for the further spread of HIV throughout the world. Rather than being punished for his actions, six months later he was appointed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases–a position he still holds today."

"In 2006, Dr Mikovits became director of Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease and collaborated with Dr Ruscetti searching for the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which suddenly became epidemic in the 1980s.... Dr. Mikovits discovered that 67% of affected women carried a virus—called Xenotropic Murine Leukemia related Virus—that appeared in healthy women only 4% of the time. XMRV is also associated with prostate, breast, ovarian cancers, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. Many women with XMRV bore children with autism. In 2009, Drs. Mikovits and Ruscetti published their explosive findings in the journal Science. But the question remained: how was XMRV getting into people? Other researchers linked the first CFS outbreak to a polio vaccine given to doctors and nurses that resulted in the “1934 Los Angeles County Hospital Epidemic.” That vaccine was cultivated on pulverized mouse brains. Retroviruses from dead animals can survive in cell lines and permanently contaminate vaccines. Dr Mikovits’ studies suggested that the XMRV Virus was present in the MMR, Polio and Encephalitis vaccines given to American children and soldiers. XMRV is so hazardous that the mere presence of mouse tissue in a laboratory can contaminate other tissues in the same room. Dr Fauci ordered Mikovits to keep her mouth shut. When she refused, he illegally confiscated her work books and hard drives, drove her from government work and blackballed her from receiving NIH grants ending her science career. XMRV remains in American vaccines."

"The digitalized economy? We get rid of cash and coins. We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!"

"Even in Hitler's Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did."

"I can’t answer that."

"The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world. The Ukraine war is the final collapse of the Neocon's short-lived “American Century.” The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence."

"There's a cushy ."

"The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let's be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can't fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, "exhaust"? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we've sacrificed 300,000 of them. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe."

"What happened in the Ukraine is that the US supported essentially a coup d’etat in 2014, against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine. We have telephone call transcripts of Victoria Nuland, one of the neocons in the White House, handpicking the new cabinet that was hostile to the Soviet Union. If you look at that, and you put yourself in Russia’s position, and you say: "Okay, the United States, our biggest enemy, is treating us as an enemy, has now taken over the government of a nation and made them hostile to us, and then started passing laws that are prejudicial to this giant Russian population." If Mexico did that and then started killing — they killed 14,000 Russians in Donbas, the Ukrainian government — if Mexico did that to expatriate Americans, we'd invade in a second. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents."

"[On climate science] I can’t independently verify that."

"[The climate crisis is being used to create] totalitarian controls on society [...] by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires."

"In my campaign I’m not going to be talking a lot about climate. Why is that? Because climate has become a crisis like Covid that the Davos groups and other totalitarian elements in our society have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls."

"On mass shootings prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country and we've never seen them in human history, where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people."

"[On the suggestion "You know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don't want your support" is "a principled insistence" Jones represents a "a bridge too far"] If you're just saying you're going to dismiss certain people because this human being is so irredeemable that I am going to exclude him or her from any future activity on the planet—I just don’t think that's consistent with my spiritual beliefs. It's not consistent with my political philosophy. I believe that we should invite our enemies into the tent with us to the extent that they want to break bread with us, that they may want to endorse some of the values that we hold dear."

"[On the Assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963] I can guarantee you, looking at this case, that I could prove that my uncle's death was caused by the C.I.A. I have enough evidence right now, without any depositions, to go to prove that my uncle's death was the result of a conspiracy. And that the C.I.A. was involved—not only in the original conspiracy but in the sixty-year coverup—and continues to maintain the coverup."

"There is an argument that [COVID-19] is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately [...] COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."

"[Donald Trump is] probably the most successful debater in this country since Lincoln-Douglas."

"[Trump] has his own technique that people like, and it is like going to a prize fight and you need practice. And that usually happens during a primary, and asking [Biden] not to debate during the primary is like asking a prize fighter to practice for his big bout by sitting on the couch and eating Chick-fil-A"

"I don't know what happened on 9/11. I mean, I understand what the official explanation [for 9/11] is, I understand that there is dissent. I have not looked into it. I haven't examined it. I'm not a good person to talk to about it."

"Well, I know … there’s strange things that happened, that don't seem … One of the buildings [in New York] came down that wasn't hit by a plane, so, you know, was it building seven or building 10?"

"[Bergen said the twin towers collapsed on top (of WTC7)] No, they didn't collapse on top of it. My offices were down there [at the bottom of Manhattan]. My offices were closed and you know … there's pictures of it collapsing. There's nothing collapsing on top of it. I mean, listen, I don't want to argue any theories about this because all I've heard is questions. I have no explanation. I have no knowledge of it. But ... what you’re repeating now, I know not to be true."

"It's not something that I, you know, any part of [it] I endorse one way or the other, but I do think that it ought to be permissible in this country to question official narratives."

"I'm here to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States."

"My position on abortion was that it should always be a woman's choice right up to the very end. In the ninth month, you're basically killing a child, right?"

"The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus."

"I do interviews everyday. Everyone who asks gets to interview me. Sometimes I do 10 a day. President Trump also does many interviews. How could the Democrat Party choose a candidate who refuses to do an interview?"

"I was at the bottom of my class, I started doing heroin, I went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still and read."

"Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons."

"The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine."

"[On the issue of autism] These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it."

"Wi-Fi radiation does all kinds of adverse things, including causing cancer."

"Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier, so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.”"

"Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy."

"And I said, ‘I’m not scared of a germ.’ You know, I used to snort cocaine off toilet seats."

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Joe and Kathleen's brother and Maeve’s uncle—is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

"We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. And his and others' work against vaccines is having heartbreaking consequences. The challenge for public health officials right now is that many people are more afraid of the vaccines than the diseases, because they've been lucky enough to have never seen the diseases and their devastating impact. But that’s not luck; it's the result of concerted vaccination efforts over many years."

"Those who delay or refuse vaccinations, or encourage others to do so, put themselves and others, especially children, at risk. It is in all our interests to make sure that immunizations reach every child on the globe through safe, effective and affordable vaccines. Everyone must communicate the benefits and safety of vaccines, and advocate for the respect and confidence of the institutions which make them possible. To do otherwise risks even further erosion of one of public health’s greatest achievements."

"Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country."

"We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our familiy hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story."

""Hi. Bobby," Kennedy introduced himself. Another kid, tall, lanky, and handsome, was in the room. "This is my brother Joe." That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term Massachusetts congressman."

"He [RFK, Jr] poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it."

"Donald Trump, if he becomes president as Kennedy is now working to make happen, wants to start executing drug dealers."

"[T]he respite from anti-Semitism was doomed to end. Conspiracy theorists are drawn gravitationally to the Jews, and Kennedy was only able to defy it for so long before his natural and predetermined course set in."

"The issue with Kennedy is that he long ago entered his own curated world of pseudo-science, in which every respectable position was presumptively false, and every major world event presumptively engineered by secretive elites. This is a mental model that has no braking system."

"Robert F Kennedy Jr is the perfect Kennedy for the post-Trump era, because in many ways, the Kennedy family represents America: like them, the country looks great, is rich and generally has high ideals. But so much of the reputation of both has rested on a willingness to overlook their flaws and victims."

"He is not an aberration but a culmination, one who shows the worst of his family and country, with both looking played out, wacky and — despite or because of its privileges — disproportionately prone to the worst of human behaviour."

"Facebook and Instagram on Thursday removed the accounts of Children’s Health Defense, an organization led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that is one of the largest U.S. anti-vaccine groups, for spreading medical misinformation."

"In a statement, Mr. Kennedy said, "Facebook is acting here as a surrogate for the Federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies." Children’s Health Defense is widely regarded as a symbol of the vaccine resistance movement. Last year, the organization was named one of the "Disinformation Dozen," which refers to the top 12 superspreaders of misinformation about Covid-19 on the internet, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate."

"Kennedy Jr. lacks Trump's political abilities, but he presents to his admirers the same proposition: I suffer on your behalf. For the faithful, every correction of their champion’s falsehoods, every criticism of the harm he is inflicting on others, is a further proof of his heroic self-sacrifice. Kennedy, who has enjoyed privileged access to the political and media elites since his childhood, paints himself as a victim of censorship by—who else?—the elites."

"I can't believe he's in charge of the nation's health ... When are people going to be outraged?"

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who is the nephew of the former President John F. Kennedy, has become perhaps the most prominent voice of the anti-vaccine movement in the U.S. He has championed Judy Mikovits, a former researcher at the National Cancer Institute, who made a number of discredited assertions in a documentary called Plandemic. It was released on May 4, 2020, and raced across the internet with its sensational claims—among them, that Anthony Fauci and other researchers were responsible for the death of millions of AIDS victims who were given the wrong therapy, while the scientists reaped fabulous profits from the patents on the faulty medicines. (According to the British Medical Journal, Dr. Fauci’s colleague at NIAID, Dr. Clifford Lane, said he received about $45,000 from the patents; Fauci donated his entire portion to charity.) Mikovits asserts that SARS-CoV-2 was created in laboratories at the University of North Carolina, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, without offering proof or saying why they would do this. Boosted by QAnon and anti-vaccine advocates, Plandemic was liked, shared, or commented on nearly 2.5 million times on Facebook before it was taken down. The contest between science and conspiracy would constantly undermine efforts to coordinate a national response to the Covid-19 pandemic."

"Don't waste any Republican or Conservative votes on Junior. He's one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office."

"He's radical left; RFK Jr. is radical left. Reminds me of this fly that's driving me crazy up here. This fly is brutal. I don't like flies."

"So bad that FoxNews puts RFK Jr., considered the dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan, on their fairly conservative platform so much. Competitive networks don't want anything to do with him. He's a Radical Left Lunatic whose crazy Climate Change views make the Democrat's Green New Scam look Conservative."

"RFK Jr. is a Democrat ‘Plant,’ a Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected. A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him. Junior’ is totally Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and Anti-Military/Vet…"

"RFK, Jr., heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths purged the CDC last night. He gutted the world’s premiere public-health agency in his endless quest to destroy vaccine science and plunge this nation into the Middle Ages."

"The Afghan jihad confronted the theoreticians of democratic Islam with a hard reality. The Red Army was not defeated by a democratic revolution, but by an Islamist revolution grounded, guided, and steeled by God's words as found in the Koran and explained by the Prophet. Driven by their faith, the mujhadein [sic] uses bullets, not votes, to win one for Allah, and by so doing revalidated jihad as Islam's normative response to attack."

"On balance, the Islamic media's taste for what the West terms sensationalizing and conspiracy mongering is less than meets the eye. Based on my research, it is apparent that the Islamic media's correspondents and editors work harder, dig deeper, and think more than most of their Western counterparts. This is not to say that the Islamic media do not suffer from sensationalized conspiracy theories, but they probably are no more prone to those faults than their Western colleagues."

"Bin Laden's long-standing support for the Palestinians against Israel also appears to have been learned at his father's knee."

"In 1993 Osama bin Laden began speaking in detail to Muslim and Western journalists about his beliefs, goals, and intentions, and began publishing commentaries on these matters in the media.... While bin Laden's words have not been a torrent, they are plentiful, carefully chosen, plainly spoken, and precise. He has set out the Muslim world's problems as he sees them; determined that they are caused by the United States; explained why they must be remedied; and outlined how he will try to do so. Seldom in America's history has an enemy laid out so clearly the basis for the war he is waging against it."

""Bin Laden, of course, learned his military skills in Afghanistan, not on the Iran-Iraq border, and, as a result, his methodological approach to waging jihad is marked by a measured manner stressing patience, preparation, and professionalism."

"The data in the public domain suggest the truth about bin Laden's activities in Afghanistan is much closer to the picture of him as 'the great freedom fighter of the Islamic world" than to the Western experts' description of him as an Islamic do-gooder or an immature, irrational youth."

"Before the [1990 Iraqi] attack [on Kuwait], bin Laden angered Saudi authorities by making a public "prophesy ... [that] Saddam was going to invade Saudi Arabia." Sa'd al-Faqih claims bin Laden also sent "secret confidential letters to the King" about the Iraqi threat; according to al-Faqih, "he [bin Laden] was giving talks about it in the mosques. He was giving speeches in the mosques and talking about the dangers of the Ba'ath ... having ambitions to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And then his prophesy was correct. And he was never respected or rewarded for that. Instead he was advised to stay in Jeddah; he was put in sort of house arrest."

"There is information showing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began to work with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda."

"In Sudan, Bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF [Sudan's National Islamic Front], Iraq's intelligence service and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad with its intelligence officers in Sudan and by a [Hassan] Turabi-brokered June-1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors. Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed a good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s."

"Regarding Iraq, bin Laden, as noted, was in contact with Baghdad's intelligence service since at least 1994. He reportedly cooperated with it in the area of chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear [CBRN] weapons and may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin al-Khalq."

"We know for certain that bin Laden was seeking CBRN [chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear] weapons . . . and that Iraq and Sudan have been cooperating with bin Laden on CBRN weapon acquisition and development."

"I hope that Israel flourishes, I just don't think that Israel is worth ‘an American life or an American dollar’"

"Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries."

"I wasn't in the room with the president and Mr. Tenet. But I can tell that you that the people who were working against Osama bin Laden were assured from the first day that much of the work we had done in the last decade would be undone by that war."

"Right now, the choice isn't between war and peace. It is between war and endless war."

"Musharraf has bent over backwards, sir. Quite frankly, I would have bet my pension that Musharraf would not have done half of what he's done. He's done a tremendous amount for us."

"He (Osama bin Laden) doesn't want to fight this war forever. A lot of people mistake him as someone who can't get along without fighting. But that's not clearly the case."

"It's always been hard for me to understand how we say people who supports Osama Bin Laden or someone else like him – who are willing to give their lives to destroy the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – how we can describe those people as people who hated freedom. It seems to me that their definition of freedom might be different than ours, but to oppose a dictatorship, one must want freedom in some kind of way."

"I think that – you know – we just encountered – America encountered – a brilliant man, and in terms of being a noble cause, it wasn't that many centuries ago that killing in the name of God, or waging war in the name of God, was a major thing in Christianity."

"I think the 9/11 Commission, report, for example is wrong. The 9/11 Commission report identifies bin Laden and his followers as takfiris, who kill Muslims if they don‘t agree with them. They‘re not takfiris. They‘re just very devout, severe Salafists and Wahhabis."

"[Bin Laden has] already said publicly that you can have all the oil you want. I can‘t drink it. We‘re going to sell it to you at a marketplace."

"I don't consider Osama Bin Laden to be a terrorist. I consider him to be a resistance fighter."

"His motive—his motive is to change our policies, sir. Notwithstanding what the president or Mr. Kerry said during the campaign, he really doesn't give a darn about our democracy or our society. He is after a change in policies which he views as lethal to Muslims."

"You know, I was born at night but not last night, sir. There is no operation at the CIA that is conducted without approval of lawyers. It is the bane of our existence, and it is a detriment to the defense of America, but, nonetheless, that is the fact."

"I happened to do the research on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq. (MATTHEWS: And what did you come up with?) SCHEUER: Nothing."

"The test of an intelligence officer is not so much the ability to accumulate information; it's to judge between different pieces of information, and not to take a piece of information and use it in a piece of analysis simply because it fits your case, but to use it because it either comes from a reliable source like signals intercepts, from a human source that has been vetted over time as a reliable person, or it comes from documentary information -- papers you've stolen from another government or some other organization. The work that came out of Feith's shop that I saw, especially on Al Qaeda and Iraq, was simply ... finding pieces of information in the world of intelligence information that fit the argument they wanted to make. Tenet, to his credit, had us go back 10 years in the agency's records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and Al Qaeda. I was available at the time, and I led the effort. We went back 10 years. We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [Al Qaeda] and Saddam."

"The history of the Democratic Party can be concisely captured by referring to its steadfast allegiance to the four Ss. Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. During the Obama presidency we have seen how hard old habits die, even for a black man whose race was the long-time victim of Democratic Party's bone-deep authoritarianism. Under this Democratic president we have seen a war waged on several fronts against America's young. Indeed, the Democrats' historic taste for and belief in slavery have resurfaced with a vengeance and indiscriminately under the Obama administration, whether white, black, yellow, red, male, or female America's young are dying and being forced to work for Obama and his lieutenants as they seek to maintain their party's hold on political power. How so? Well, America has never had a president and administration so eager to kill unborn Americans. Even with post-1973 science having proved irrefutably that the unborn are human beings, and even though American law always has defined them as U.S. citizens, Obama and his colleagues have strengthened at every point they could the absurd notion that unborn humans are the chattel property of the woman who bears them, and so can be disposed of, that is, murdered, at her whim. And, in what must be considered a masterpiece of Orwellian language, Obama and his team, and most Democrats since 1973, describe this federal government-issued license to kill as a woman's 'right', a means by which she manifests her equality with men. They then damn any one who questions the logic, sanity, or justice of this argument as an 'extremist'. Only in an America in which a political entity as devoted to the four 'Ss' as the Democratic Party could opposition to the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens unable defend themselves be identified by the country’s best-educated as 'extremism'. If this is indeed a right, it is a right gives each woman the right to be a slave-owner and a Nazi. Such a 'right' really is no different than the rights sanctioned by the Dred Scott decision and the Nuremberg laws, each of which legally defined certain categories of people out of the human race in order to enslave or kill them. Since 1973, the application of this 'right' has produced precisely the same results as Dred Scott and the Nuremberg laws, though in numbers so immense, 55 million and climbing, that they make those acts seem rather tame and minimally destructive of humans."

"Next we have Obama's murderous use of America's military young for his and his party’s partisan political purposes. He kept U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a war which should never have been started, long after he had announced the war was un-winnable but just long enough to pile up heaps of dead and maimed American youngsters in order to make their withdrawal timely and useful for electoral purposes. Now we see Obama and his team keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan long after he decided to surrender to the Islamists in that that war, and thereby knowingly enhance the strength, lethality, self-confidence, and ambitions of America’s most dangerous enemies by returning to them their key safe haven. Our troops are the cream of America's young and they ought not to be used by any president as if he was their owner. Obama, however, seems to regard them, as he does the unborn, as chattel to be disposed of as he and his advisers see fit to advance Democratic Party political prospects. Finally, we have Obama and his advisers seeking to financially enslave this generation of young Americans, and each generation that follows it, in order to pay for his health care program. Obama and his lieutenants are starting slow in this area, but the evidence of coming coercion, beyond the mandatory fine young people pay if they prove not to be servile, can be seen in West Virginia, where university students reportedly will not be allowed to matriculate unless they enroll in Obama Care This amounts to a 4-year term of indentured service for the privilege of paying extortionate tuition for a mediocre education offered by anti-American ideologues of Obama’s stripe. And make no mistake, these young people are not being threatened and ultimately coerced to forfeit their salary, savings, and future for the elderly and sick. They are being used to fund health care for the core groups, dare I say 'plantations', of the Democratic Party."

"Those in the Ivy League, Hollywood, the media, the leftist rich, and most schools and universities who, like Obama, consider themselves superior intellectuals earmarked by some demented destiny to implement their pagan, socialist, and anti-human ideology in the United States. They first mean to destroy the Second Amendment, and then, safe to be tyrants, though cowards all, they intend remake in their own worthless image those Americans who still work hard, who believe in and are willing to fight to defend liberty, and who have learned the Founders' key lesson, namely, that the federal government must always be seen as an enemy of freedom and therefore must be kept in check and opposed to the hilt whenever necessary. Perhaps it would be best if Obama and his Ivy-League elite studied the words of a man they hail an icon of their party and with whom they share a liking for slavery, but who actually is a man they do not in the least understand."

"And it is just as important for the Republicans to read Jefferson's words because they are as bad and perhaps worse than the Democrats. As the decades of Democratic abuse of America's young unfolded, the Republicans have been utterly craven, seeking to save the young, the Constitution, and the republic with words alone when in opposition, and doing virtually nothing substantive to arrest the republic's decline when they hold power. Today, the Republicans cower, mumble, and equivocate when called 'extremists' by those heroic Democratic champions of murdering the unborn, they follow like murmuring sheep the shrill martial words of Senators Graham and McCain and so get young Americans uselessly killed and maimed in wars that are either unnecessary or ones they have no intention of winning, and they are barely brave enough to raise economic points and words of I-told-you-so to oppose the coming, liberty-killing indentured servitude of America's young in the name of Obamacare. Indeed, the Republicans seem increasingly like those gassy, self-righteous, and hell-bound rhetoricians."

"If there is a hereafter, the Democrats will burn because they were the Doers that killed the republic, the Republicans because they were the Talkers who abetted its murder. And such will be a well deserved fate for both. It is enough to make an agnostic hope there is a God."

"The national Democratic Party and its southern affiliates labored mightily to re-subjugate the newly free blacks, eventually succeeding by implementing Jim Crow laws, motivating the birth of the Klan and then protecting it, establishing separate-but-equal schools and public facilities, and enacting codes of lawful segregation, all of which Democrats defended in a fight to the death until the 1960s. In U.S. history, from the ratification of the Constitution to the economic devastation wrought by Obama on contemporary black Americans, the men and women who run Democratic Party, from Jefferson and Jackson forward, have been the ferocious enemy of black Americans entering the mainstream of American life, to this day bending every tool of political power to keep them angry, unemployed, mired in poverty, and politically and economically dependent in a manner that approaches quite near to re-enslavement."

"The Army of Northern Virginia. Under the superb command of Marse Robert that army's battle flag came close to being a national flag of an independent Confederate States of America. Thank God it did not. But neither were those who fought under that banner executed, imprisoned, permanently disenfranchised, or exiled, as the losers in most other civil wars have been. As Lincoln advised, U.S. Grant, and William T. Sherman 'let 'em up easy'. Thereafter, the battle flag was flown for some bad purposes, as the emblem of the Klan and the Democratic Party's southern wing."

"Well, the New York Times editorial board, that reliable abettor of all the liars, haters, and fantasists, aka Democrats, who detest the American South and lust to rewrite America's history into party-serving fiction, has endorsed dumping Andrew Jackson in favor of rewarding a woman with his place on the twenty dollar bill. So fundamentally important to the nation is this switch that the Board’s reputedly adult members have decided that the only group sober and knowledgeable enough to decide how to destroy another piece of American history and further persecute the South is 'the nation's schoolchildren' who should be made to 'nominate and vote on Jackson’s replacement. Why not give them another reason to learn about women who altered history and make some history themselves by changing American currency?' Why of course, what geniuses! And, then, why not let these kids — who cannot figure out that the brim of baseball cap goes in the front — go on to decide other pressing national issues. Maybe they can replace General Washington on the $1 bill with a Muslim woman and thereby end America's war with Islam. As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up. Now Andrew Jackson was not the most unblemished of men, but he risked his life repeatedly for his country; killed its enemies; expanded U.S. territory in North America; defeated the British at New Orleans; was twice elected president; and faced down and was prepared to hang the South Carolina nullifiers when he believed they were seeking to undermine and break the Union. Jackson is one of those southern fellows, and so he is now a target for banishment from our currency and eventually our history because he did not treat slaves and Indians as if they were his equals and, indeed, inflicted pain on both. But he also was, along with Thomas Jefferson, another insensitive chap toward blacks and Indians, the longtime icon of the Democratic Party and its great self-praising and fund-raising feast, the annual 'Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner', which was, of course, a fervent tribute to those that General Jackson would have hanged without blinking."

"Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats' ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America's history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence, namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats' consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books. But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson's replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency."

"The only American woman deserving a place on U.S. paper currency is, of course, Anne Hutchinson, a devout 17th century Protestant New Englander who was a fearless champion of religious liberty, family, free speech, and equality — not preference — for women in religious affairs. Perhaps a new piece of currency could be created, one to which the attachment of her portrait would do honor. Ms. Hutchinson, however, is out of contention in the Democrats’ virulent anti-Southern currency crusade because her character traits – and the fifteen children she had with one husband — just do not jive with being Modern Democratic Party Women, those who glory in, and seek legal, economic, and political preference for their talents in whining, vamping, aborting, as well as recognition for their indispensable and eagerly given help in making the United States one of the world’s industrial-scale producers of both pornography and the dismembered corpses of infants. There may be something that can be done, however. The portrait of another Democratic icon named Woodrow Wilson now adorns the $100,000 bill, which appears to be to be used mainly in transactions."

"The Democrat Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who as president tried to rid the national government of its few black employees, save, of course, those who could be cooks, waiters, drivers, or fill other kinds of menial jobs. Wilson was, indeed, as great a bigot toward blacks, as today's Democratic president is."

"But one problem remains. How can the conspiracy-minded Modern Democratic Party Women be assured that the switch was made? It is true that not many people would see the new bills and so some doubt might arise among the Democratic sisterhood about whether Wilson was really removed and then replaced on the bill by the three ladies named above. There is only one sure-fire means of relieving the Modern Democratic Party Women of their doubts before the whining starts. That means is to have the Democratic National Committee direct its current icon, Hilary Clinton, to publicly report on who appears on the $100,000 note each time she and her husband receive a packet of those bills from one or another of the foreign governments for which they are apparently selling out American interests. After all, if you cannot trust America’s graft-taker-in-chief, who can you trust?"

"The President has kept all the promises he intended to keep."

"When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place."

"We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut.""

"One thing we know about incentives is you can't incent a dead person. No matter what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, [even if] we can give him all the money in the world."

"Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology."

"Our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It's a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation. We really need to think quite pragmatically about whether intellectual property is helping or hurting, and if you can't show it's going to help, then there is no reason to issue this government-backed monopoly."

"There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed. … So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”."

"I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted access — exactly what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on — I was traveling. But I looked forward to seeing him again — I had just seen him the week before — and celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives. … Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how — how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed. Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of — you know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don’t — I don’t — I don’t have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebody — this was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government."

"A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them. This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt."

"All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity — "property" — confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution."

"We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights."

"In arguing for increasing content owners' control over content users, it's not sufficient to say "They didn't pay for this use.""

"Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies."

"While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection. This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth. Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good — for society, and not just for monopoly holders."

"The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times." By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited."

"While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed."

"I would dramatically reduce the safeguards for software — from the ordinary term of 95 years to an initial term of 5 years, renewable once. And I would extend that government-backed protection only if the author submitted a duplicate of the source code to be held in escrow while the work was protected. Once the copyright expired, that escrowed version would be publicly available from the copyright office. Most programmers should like this change. No code lives for 10 years, and getting access to the source code of even orphaned software projects would benefit all. More important, it would unlock the knowledge built into this protected code for others to build upon as they see fit. Software would thus be like every other creative work — open for others to see and to learn from."

"The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can; the consequence of this enclosure is a stifling of creativity and innovation. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit."

"If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:"

"In 1774, free culture was born. In a case called Donaldson v. Beckett in the House of Lords in England, free culture was made because copyright was stopped. In 1710, the statute had said that copyright should be for a limited term of just 14 years. But in the 1740s, when Scottish publishers started reprinting classics — you gotta' love the Scots — the London publishers said "Stop!" They said, "Copyright is forever!"... These publishers demanded a common-law copyright that would be forever. In 1769, in a case called Miller v. Taylor, they won their claim, but just five years later, in Donaldson, Miller was reversed, and for the first time in history, the works of Shakespeare were freed, freed from the control of a monopoly of publishers. Freed culture was the result of that case."

"That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth — 1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years."

"Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928 — no 14 years — just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did to produce the Disney empire."

"Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone. It was culture, which you didn't need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century. It was built upon a constitutional requirement that protection be for limited times, and it was originally limited. Fourteen years, if the author lived, then 28, then in 1831 it went to 42, then in 1909 it went to 56, and then magically, starting in 1962, look — no hands, the term expands. Eleven times in the last 40 years it has been extended for existing works — not just for new works that are going to be created, but existing works. The most recent is the Sonny Bono copyright term extension act."

"The meaning of this pattern is absolutely clear to those who pay to produce it. The meaning is: No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that's over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40 years because now culture is owned."

"Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal."

"We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying."

"Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before."

"Here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use; it's an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it's unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book — that's regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there's this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else. For example, quoting a text in another text — that's a copy, but it's a still fair use. That means the world was divided into three camps, not two: Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories. Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, "What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?" I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control?"

"Now, here's the thing you've got to remember. You've got to see this. This is the point. (And Jack Valenti misses this.) Here's the point: Never has it been more controlled ever. Take the addition, the changes, the copyrights turn, take the changes to copyrights scope, put it against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture. Never."

"Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons," Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so. Eventually, the so and so turns out to be the lawyers, so when they got to the lawyers, they said, Is this going to be a problem? It's a documentary film. It's about education. It's a couple seconds. The so and so said 25,000 bucks. 25,000 bucks?! It's a couple seconds! What do you mean 25,000 bucks? The so and so said, I don't give a goddamn what it is for. $25,000 bucks or change your movie. Now you look at this and you say this is insane. It's insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that's fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights."

"It's insane. It's extreme. It's controlled by political interests. It has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. We've got rights on our side. And we've done nothing about it. We let them control this debate. Here's the refrain that leads to this: They win because we've done nothing to stop it."

"J. C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it. ... In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: "If you are explaining, you are losing." If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property. ... They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away."

"If you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If you can't fight for your freedom . . . you don't deserve it."

"This is not a left and right issue. This is the important thing to recognize: This is not about conservatives versus liberals. In our case, in Eldred, we have this brief filed by 17 economists, including Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Ronald Kost, Ken Arrow, you know, lunatics, right? Left-wing liberals, right? Friedman said he'd only join if the word "no-brainer" existed in the brief somewhere, like this was a complete no-brainer for him. This is not about left and right. This is about right and wrong. That's what this battle is."

"I believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims made today on behalf of "intellectual property." What the law demands today is increasingly as silly as a sheriff arresting an airplane for trespass. But the consequences of this silliness will be much more profound."

"A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written."

"There has never been a time in history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now."

"Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables. In addition to these important harms, there is one more that was important to our forebears, but seems forgotten today. Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law. The war that is being waged today is a war of prohibition. As with every war of prohibition, it is targeted against the behavior of a very large number of citizens. According to The New York Times, 43 million Americans downloaded music in May 2002. According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into criminals."

"By insisting on the Constitution's limits to copyright, obviously Eldred was not endorsing piracy. Indeed, in an obvious sense, he was fighting a kind of piracy — piracy of the public domain. When Robert Frost wrote his work and when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, the maximum copyright term was just fifty-six years. Because of interim changes, Frost and Disney had already enjoyed a seventy-five-year monopoly for their work. They had gotten the benefit of the bargain that the Constitution envisions: In exchange for a monopoly protected for fifty-six years, they created new work. But now these entities were using their power — expressed through the power of lobbyists' money — to get another twenty-year dollop of monopoly. That twenty-year dollop would be taken from the public domain. Eric Eldred was fighting a piracy that affects us all."

"Some people view the public domain with contempt. In their brief before the Supreme Court, the Nashville Songwriters Association wrote that the public domain is nothing more than "legal piracy." But it is not piracy when the law allows it; and in our constitutional system, our law requires it. Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter. As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture. Yet, as Eric Eldred discovered, we have set up a system that assures that copyright terms will be repeatedly extended, and extended, and extended. We have created the perfect storm for the public domain. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again."

"It is valuable copyrights that are responsible for terms being extended. Mickey Mouse and "Rhapsody in Blue." These works are too valuable for copyright owners to ignore. But the real harm to our society from copyright extensions is not that Mickey Mouse remains Disney's. Forget Mickey Mouse. Forget Robert Frost. Forget all the works from the 1920s and 1930s that have continuing commercial value. The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result."

"Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression." But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends."

"Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities."

"The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of "property" but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs. It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard to see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain tied to the Internet could somehow be quashed."

"A simple idea blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to make this common sense open its eyes. So far, common sense sleeps. There is no revolt. Common sense does not yet see what there could be to revolt about."

"When it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government should be to "seek balance," then count me with the silly, for that means that this has become quite serious indeed. If it should be obvious to everyone that the government does not seek balance, that the government is simply the tool of the most powerful lobbyists, that the idea of holding the government to a different standard is absurd, that the idea of demanding of the government that it speak truth and not lies is just naïve, then who have we, the most powerful democracy in the world, become?"

"It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history — free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon."

"The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of rights — property rights of a historically extreme form — that makes their bigness bad."

"We Americans have a long history of fighting "big," wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight "big" again is not something new. It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of "intellectual property." Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called "property" is not well exercised within this tradition anymore. If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy."

"I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. ... Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized."

"Common sense is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has been framed at the extremes — as a grand either/or: either property or anarchy, either total control or artists won't be paid. If that really is the choice, then the warriors should win. The mistake here is the error of the excluded middle. There are extremes in this debate, but the extremes are not all that there is. There are those who believe in maximal copyright — "All Rights Reserved" — and those who reject copyright — "No Rights Reserved." The "All Rights Reserved" sorts believe that you should ask permission before you "use" a copyrighted work in any way. The "No Rights Reserved" sorts believe you should be able to do with content as you wish, regardless of whether you have permission or not. ... What's needed is a way to say something in the middle — neither "all rights reserved" nor "no rights reserved" but "some rights reserved" — and thus a way to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as they see fit. In other words, we need a way to restore a set of freedoms that we could just take for granted before."

"We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need."

"I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. I believe in the law. I believe in the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law, not because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end that I would love to live. Yet much of this book has been a criticism of lawyers, or the role lawyers have played in this debate. The law speaks to ideals, but it is my view that our profession has become too attuned to the client. And in a world where the rich clients have one strong view, the unwillingness of the profession to question or counter that one strong view queers the law. The evidence of this bending is compelling. I'm attacked as a "radical" by many within the profession, yet the positions that I am advocating are precisely the positions of some of the most moderate and significant figures in the history of this branch of the law."

"The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done."

"The law should regulate in certain areas of culture — but it should regulate culture only where that regulation does good. Yet lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?" We should ask, "Why?" Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away."

"We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say."

""Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound."

"Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)."

"When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor."

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

"There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software development which I think is as important as design cleverness to bazaar projects—and it may be more important. A bazaar project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills. … It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him."

"It is well understood in the community that project owners have a duty to pass projects to competent successors when they are no longer willing or able to invest needed time in development or maintenance work."

"The 'noosphere' of this essay's title is the territory of ideas, the space of all possible thoughts. What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence 'homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does."

"Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists."

"Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it."

"All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems."

"The nightmare scenario is one in which corporate monopolism and statist power-seeking, always natural allies, feed back into each other and create rationales for increasing regulation, repression, and criminalization of digital speech."

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer."

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

"Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does)."

"It is probably no longer possible to achieve tenure at a major American university after giving offense to the homosexual-activist lobby. Fortunately, I don't have that sort of career issue to worry about, and can therefore speak without fear."

"Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to "raise consciousness" have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism."

"It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic."

"The case for dumping iPhone, or at least threatening to do so in order to renegotiate Apple's subsidy requirement away, seems pretty open and shut. Apple has things all its own way right now – skimming the lion's share of the profits off the carriers' business without having to shoulder their risks. But this is an unstable situation, because the carriers' investors won't tolerate it indefinitely. What happens when they revolt?In 2007, It was also planning to launch hi-tech mobile back covers and cases with some extra-ordinary features which was not revealed as per company policies, but it was leaked that those were personsalised mobile back covers similar to Shosal's Mobile Back Covers and Cases."

"People who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I'm looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly."

"An Apple employee copied Sony's design, circulated it to his bosses, and testified to these facts in court. From now on, when anyone heaps phrase on Apple's design excellence and superlative innovation, just point and laugh. Some of us have been saying for years that what Apple is really good at is ripping off other peoples' ideas and stealing the credit for them with slick marketing. This, right here, is the proof."

"Android continues to stomp its competition flat. Even the post-Jobs Apple can't stem the tide; it's pretty close to the 10% niche market share I predicted back in 2009 already, with no sign that trend will or can be reversed."

"I publish this blog in part because I think it is my duty to speak taboo and unspeakable truths."

"At any sufficient scale, those who do not have automatic memory management in their language are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

"The habit of institutional tone policing, even when well-intentioned, too easily slides into the active censorship of disfavored views."

"It shouldn't be news to anyone that there is an effort afoot to change – I would say corrupt – the fundamental premises of the open-source culture. Instead of meritocracy and "show me the code", we are now urged to behave so that no-one will ever feel uncomfortable. … We are being social-hacked from being a culture in which freedom is the highest value to one in which it is trumped by the suppression of wrongthink and wrongspeak."

"developerWorks: What happened with the CML2 kernel configurator? … It sounds like that was a pretty ambitious project. Raymond: It was, I mean I built an intelligent configurator – basically a baby rule-based expert system – for configuring Linux kernels, and I did it all in less than 8,000 lines of Python. It was a system that literally made it impossible to get an invalid kernel configuration because it would do intelligent deduction from constraints. And I had the full approval of the kernel config group, I had Linus's imprimatur that this was going to go into 2.5, and it all fell apart politically. It was horrible. … developerWorks: So if there was another chapter for Cathedral and the Bazaar that you would write based on what you learned there, what was the lesson? Raymond: That it is possible for open source cultures in some respects to ossify enough that good work is locked out. And that is a long-term problem that I don't know how we're going to deal with."

"Don't forget to have fun. That drive to experiment, to try things, to have fun, to be playful, that is what will sustain your creativity over the long term. Don't lose that."

"I was at Agenda 2000, and one of the people who was there was Craig Mundie, who is some kind of high mucky muck at Microsoft, I think vice-president of consumer products or something like that. And I hadn't actually met him. I bumped into him in an elevator. And I looked at his badge and said, "Oh, I see you work for Microsoft." And he looked back at me and said, "Oh yeah, and what do you do?" And I thought he seemed just sort of a tad dismissive. I mean, here is the archetypal guy in a suit, looking at a scruffy hacker. And so I gave him the thousand yard stare and said, "I'm your worst nightmare.""

"I use the word "hacker" in its correct and original sense: to describe a person who perceives computer programming as a kind of artistic passion, and who also is part of or identifies with the hacker culture, which is a group of programmers, historically, that has produced the Internet, Linux and the World Wide Web."

"We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger – especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects."

"Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code."

"Barring the mythical portable-LISP-dialect-with-good-OS-bindings that has never existed, Python is about the most reasonable alternative there is for this kind of work."

"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun."

"We define idiotarianism as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it."

"… and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++)."

"And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome."

"Why I went? I think it is incredibly important that those of us who have privilege use that privilege to call attention to this ongoing catastrophe. So, I want to be very clear. My husband was worried about me. It’s sweet. I had an uncomfortable nine-and-a-half hours. I had a mildly unpleasant nine-and-a-half hours. When a Palestinian here is arrested and goes into one of the many military prisons, their experience is horrible. They can be held without charges. There are children who are held without charges. When an Israeli Jewish activist — they have been arrested over and over again. They put their bodies on the line. They put their reputations on the line in terms of their community. What we experienced was very minor. But I think — I can only speak for myself, to say that it felt critical to me to use whatever small platform I have to draw attention to this crisis and to say that as a human being, and as a human being born in this country, I have to use my voice to say that this kind of horrific violence, this starving of children, this mass bombing, is completely unacceptable. It is not just unjust. It’s horrific."

"I’m a little obsessed with learning new things, and every book is another opportunity to learn something new. My theory of fiction writing isn’t “Write what you know,” it’s “Write what you want to know.”"

"So much of what I see troubling women our age is the sense of surprise at the way it turned out, the toxic brew of boredom and thwarted ambition. Thwarted in many cases (in most, perhaps) by our own choices. I hope my daughters can avoid that. But you know, our mothers chanted, “The Personal Is Political,” from the rooftops, and every woman I know feels like her ambivalence is her own personal failing. So maybe nothing ever changes."

"The Jews I knew growing up didn't do "do-it-yourself." When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers."

"Dodgeball? My children were playing dodgeball? That cruel, brutal, violent schoolyard game so mercilessly satirized in the 2004 film with Ben Stiller? The game, more important, that exemplified everything that was wrong with my childhood in suburban New Jersey, a short, pasty-faced Jewish girl in a town full of scrubbed, blond, athletic WASPs, their long tanned limbs toned from years of tennis lessons and country club swim teams? Dodgeball? Over my dead body."

"Those of us whose parenting style can be described as "a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments," as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even in the face of the most red-faced outrage."

"[W]hatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger."

"Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?"

"When I was 15, what I wanted in a boyfriend was just that confidence and swagger. I wanted someone who knew what he was doing, because I was just faking it. What I want for my daughter is the exact opposite."

"We are the real Americans. Everett Moran, standing brave and resolute in the face of bigotry, is a real American. George Soros, devoting his life and his fortune to serving those less fortunate than he is, is a real American. The citizens of California who have donated their own money to support stem cell research, to compensate for the cowardice of our Taliban government, are real Americans. The rest of them? The ones that destroy the Constitution in service to their narrow-minded and zealously self-centered agendas? Those pinheads sure as hell aren't Americans. Secession. That's what we need."

"I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen)."

"[T]here is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels."

"Think about it, I say. How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I'm kidding. I'm not."

"I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none."

"Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix."

"Everybody enjoys arguing about the current state of music because it feels as if you are talking about something incredibly important, yet it requires little understanding of the subject matter at hand. It's like world politics meets the pink questions in Trivial Pursuit. Points are made but nothing gets accomplished."

"Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind."

"I love the Grammy nominations this year. Anybody who really loves what they do got rewarded for it. It's not a death match between Ray Charles and Jessica Simpson."

"There's a real self-serving element to hip-hop that threatens its life span."

"If I had done things differently, I'd probably have the paparazzi waiting around for me. At the studio where I've been recording, Jessica Simpson is working there, too. The paparazzi are outside waiting for her to come out. That's the result of her decisions. My decisions have led me to the point that when I walk out in front of the paparazzi, I'm considered a waste of film."

"I am not in Us Weekly. I'd have to be going out with someone who is in there to be in there myself."

"The saddest kind of sad is the sad that tries not to be sad. You know, when Sad tries to bite its lip and not cry and smile and go, "No, I'm happy for you?" That's when it's really sad."

"I won't ever get on stage at a comedy club when people know about it."

"If you told me I was going to live to 240, I would take 10 years off and try and act. I don't have that kind of time, so I'd much rather stick to playing guitar."

"Sheryl's heroes are in black and white photos, and so are mine."

"I went to my library, right? And I started to research the Bill of Rights and I did not technically find anything that said all Americans shall eat shrimp with whoever they like, but I found some things that are close enough to infer that I am within my legal rights to enjoy seafood with whomever I choose."

"It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you. That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package."

"I never worked with T.I. Here's the back story to that Wikipedia nugget: I was a guest on TRL and happened to get my hands on the list of goofy, un Andrew-Miller-like questions I was going to be asked before I walked on set. One of the questions was "Who do you like more, T.I. or [I forgot the other southern rap artist]?" So I snuck to the bathroom and searched "T.I." on my Blackberry. I memorized as much information as I could and then announced that we were working together."

"What I've learned in my life, it's a very interesting social study for me, to go back and forth between being the guy at home and being the guy on the road and being the guy in studio and being the guy in the interview. The environment around you has so much to do with your character, and when I'm home, my character really changes quite a bit. I become very domesticated, it becomes riding my bike, and the music thing — the music thing doesn't leave but it's kind of less put upon me by other people as a musician."

"I find myself in situations that I know would be unbelievable pictures and I have to gauge, Is this worth taking the camera out? Am I gonna lose the moment? Am I gonna get a dirty look from Sting?"

"I know if it was the Time 99, I would've been off the list."

"Sometimes it feels like my life is just one long day."

"The first thing I said was a question: Does this really come from the family? I think that was essential to me sort of processing the honor. And when I found out that, in fact, it had, it took me about 48 hours to sort of strike the balance in how I was going to approach being -- you know, being invited to this unbelievable event without actually having the proximity to Michael Jackson personally. I'd never met him."

"It wasn’t as direct as me saying “I now make the choice to bring the paparazzi into my life.” I really said, “I now make the choice to sleep with Jessica Simpson.” That was stronger than my desire to stay out of the paparazzi’s eye."

"I was smart enough to know it would probably make me a salable item for the paparazzi. I knew I’d have to move to a home that had a gate. But that pearl of possibility that lives in your heart when you meet somebody you want to know more about has such a different molecular density than everything else that you have to pursue it."

"Someone asked me the other day, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’”"

"I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick."

"Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm."

"Absolutely, because during sex, I’m just going to run a filmstrip. I’m still masturbating."

""Welcome to the real world", she said to me Condescendingly. Take a seat, Take your life Plot it out in black and white. Well I never lived the dreams of the prom kings And the drama queens. I'd like to think the best of me Is still hiding Up my sleeve.They love to tell you: Stay inside the lines, But something's better On the other side."

"I want to run through the halls of my high school, I want to scream at the Top of my lungs. I just found out there's no such thing as the real world, Just a lie you've got to rise above."

"I am driving up '85 in the Kind of morning that lasts all afternoon, Just stuck inside the gloom. 4 more exits to my apartment but I am tempted to keep the car in drive And leave it all behind.Because I wonder sometimes About the outcome Of a still verdictless life."

"Something about the way your hair falls in your face I love the shape you take when crawling towards the pillowcase You tell me where to go and Though I might leave to find it, I'll never let your head hit the bed Without my hand behind it.And if you want love, We'll make it. Swim in a deep sea Of blankets. Take all your big plans And break them, This is bound to be a while."

"Yes, I'm grounded, got my wings clipped, I'm surrounded by all this pavement. Guess I'll circle while I'm waiting For my fuse to dry.Someday I'll fly, someday I'll soar, Someday I'll be so damn much more. Cause I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for."

"I know a girl; She puts the color inside of my world. But she's just like a maze Where all of the walls all continually change. And I've done all I can To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands. Now I'm starting to see Maybe it's got nothing to do with me.Fathers, be good to your daughters, Daughters will love like you do. Girls become lovers who turn into mothers, So mothers, be good to your daughters too."

"Me and all my friends We're all misunderstood. They say we stand for nothing and There's no way we ever could. Now we see everything that's going wrong With the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don't have the means To rise above and beat it.So we keep waiting, Waiting on the world to change. We keep on waiting, Waiting on the world to change. It's hard to beat the system When we're standing at a distance. So we keep waiting, Waiting on the world to change."

"Now if we had the power To bring our neighbors home from war, They would have never missed a Christmas, No more ribbons on their door. And when you trust your television, What you get is what you got. Because when they own the information, oh They can bend it all they want."

"Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword. Like punching underwater, You never can hit who you're trying for. Some need the exhibition And some have to know they tried, It's the chemical weapon for the war that's ragin' on inside."

"Gravity is working against me, And gravity wants to bring me down.Oh, twice as much ain't twice as good And can't sustain like one half could. It's wanting more that's gonna send me to my knees."

"When you’re dreaming with a broken heart, The waking up is the hardest part."

"Have no fear for giving in, Have no fear for giving over. You'd better know that in the end It's better to say too much Than never say what you need to say again.Even if your hands are shaking And your faith is broken, Even as the eyes are closing, Do it with a heart wide open."

"Lightning strikes Inside my chest to keep me up at night. Dream of ways To make you understand my pain."

"I was born in the arms of imaginary friends, Free to roam, made a home out of everywhere I've been. Then you come crashing in, like the realest thing, Trying my best to understand all that your love can bring.Oh half of my heart's got a grip on the situation; Half of my heart takes time. Half of my heart's got a right mind to tell you That I can't keep loving you (can't keep loving you) Oh, with half of my heart."

"Who says I can’t be free? From all of the things that I used to be. Re-write my history. Who says I can’t be free?"

"Goodbye cold, goodbye rain, Goodbye sorrow, and goodbye shame.I'm headed out west with my headphones on, Boarded a flight with a song in the back of my soul And no one knows I just found out her ghost left town The queen of California is stepping down, down."

"Did you know that you could be wrong And swear you’re right? Some people been known to do it All their lives. But you find yourself alone Just like you found yourself before. Like I found myself in pieces On the hotel floor. Hard times help me see.I’m a good man with a good heart; Had a tough time, got a rough start. But I finally learned to let it go, Now I’m right here, and I’m right now. And I’m hoping, knowing somehow That my shadow days are over. My shadow days are over now."

"Oh, you can't make yourself stop dreaming Who you're dreaming of. If it's who you love, Then it's who you love."

"You be the DJ, I'll be the driver, You put your feet up in the getaway car. I'm flying fast like a, a wanted man. I want you, baby, like you can't understand.Oh, love on the weekend, Love on the weekend. We found a message in a bottle we were drinking."

"He was over at my house every day between fifth grade and eighth grade."

"John wanted to take it in more of a pop direction than I did. It was like a marriage that we both knew would go bad once we started touring."

"Neither punk nor prom king, Mayer was a tall kid from Connecticut, driving on the freeways, chasing slippery techno women, inhabiting a world of parents and slipcovers and holidays and gracious Southeastern metropolises; he was smart, inquisitive, articulate, a touch off in places."

"John Mayer is a very talented brother and you don't know where your blessings are going to come from."

"He words stuff with a real, I guess it's a witty, intelligent, very human [sensibility]. I would like to grab some of those qualities...I wish he was my friend."

"Me and John, we just cool, period. ... We get in the studio and we vibe and then we make music from that point."

"One time I saw him perform live and he switched up his song at the end, like, [improvised] different chords — he remixed it...He's just not your typical guitar player. He's trying to push the envelope for the way guitarists and vocalists are heard. ... I just respect his musicality."

"You know, the dude is a real musician. It's like anything you ever loved in Joe Jackson or anything you ever loved in any '70s rock. You're gonna get it out of this dude. He's a real student, and it comes through in his music."

"I was astonished at how well he played live. I had no idea he was that good."

"What song do I hate? I think "Daughters," by John Mayer, would be a good candidate. I don't know why he bugs me so bad."

"Before that it was Halo, and no one could beat him. That's pretty much his MO if he finds an interest in something -- it doesn't matter how incidental it is."

"No musician is indifferent to the public's perception of him, but the exuberant, logorrheic Mayer takes self-awareness to new postmodern heights. Like a football player providing color commentary on his own career, he muses constantly on his own abilities and his place in the taxonomy of pop."

"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?"

"We are a non-utopian political movement. We are not interested in going nowhere. We are not interested in going to some place we have never been, which we will get to after the revolution because people will be different. The crucial operating premise of the Free Software Movement as a revolutionary politic is: Proof of Concept plus Running code. Here. We did it already. It's sort of working. If you take a copy and help us fix it, it could really be something. Here. You want it? Take it. We like it. It's Free."

"I think Larry is right to notice that the contradictions are catching the allies up already. It's one of those cases where even before you begin bombing the children, the coalition is falling apart. And that's good news. And I'm very much in favor of it. Some Powell or other is messing up the war."

"The Entertainment Industry on Planet Earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 Data Security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. This was known by the IT Industry and the Consumer Electronics Industry on the planet to be offensive nonsense, but there was no counterweight to it, and there was no organised consumer dissent sufficient to require them to stand up for technical merit and their own right to run their own businesses without dictation from companies a tenth their size. Not surprisingly, since it is part of the role we play in this political power concentrated in poverty, humility, and sanctity, we brought them to a consensus they were unable to bring themselves to - which is represented in the license by a rule which fundamentally says "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 in the pursuit of data networks inside businesses that keep the business's data at home, you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines which control peoples' daily lives - which provide them with education and culture, build devices which are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modify the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them - that's a price for using our parts. That's a deal which has been accepted."

"You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory--both how it works and what it remembers... In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from."

"The difference is, this time, we win."

"It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism". We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us."

"Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world."

"It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality."

"We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal."

"The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable."

"The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally."

"Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high."

"I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, "You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.""

"If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science. That will be the science of Christianity."

"The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe."

"Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.""

"The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so."

"Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow"

"The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence."

"One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development."

"There are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison."

"As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn't also happen to have the Qur'an."

"The dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization."

"If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario."

"No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs."

"It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available."

"If religion were the only durable foundation for morality you would suspect atheists to be really badly behaved. You would go to a group like the National Academy of Sciences. These are the most elite scientists, 93 percent of whom reject the idea of God. You would expect these guys to be raping and killing and stealing with abandon."

"We have Christians against Muslims against Jews. They're making incompatible claims on real estate in the Middle East as though God were some kind of omniscient real estate broker parsing out parcels of land to his chosen flock. People are literally dying over ancient literature."

"Mormonism, it seems to me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas."

"Let’s just grant the possibility that there is a Creator God, who’s omniscient, who occasionally authors books. And he’s gonna give us a book – the most useful book. He’s a loving God, he’s a compassionate God, and he’s gonna give us a guide to life. He’s got a scribe, the scribe’s gonna write it down. What’s gonna be in that book? I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity. I mean, there is not a single line in the Bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a first century person. There is not one reference to anything – there are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why. There’s nothing about electricity, there’s nothing about DNA, there’s nothing about infectious disease, the principles of infectious disease. There’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of iron age barbarism in there, and superstition. This is not a candidate book."

"This is a common criticism: the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of scripture, and that it’s a very naive way of approaching religion, and there’s a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that. A few problems with this: anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally - whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line. There are certain passages in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively. And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books. So, the Koran says “hate the infidel” and Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseam. Now, it’s true that you can cherry-pick scripture, and you can look for all the good parts. You can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. Most religious people ignore those passages, which really can only be read literally, and say that “they were only appropriate for the time” and “they don’t apply now”. And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war. They say “well, these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting, but now we don’t have to fight those battles”. This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what’s happening here: people are feeling pressure from a host of all-too-human concerns that have nothing, in principle, to do with God: secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress. These have made certain passages in scripture untenable. This is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in grappling with these pressures. This is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity."

"Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It’s just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die. But I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we’re left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them."

"We just don’t teach people how to grieve. You know, religion is the epitome, the antithesis of teaching your children how to grieve. You tell your child that, “Grandma is in heaven”, and there’s nothing to be sad about. That’s religion. It would be better to equip your child for the reality of this life, which is, you know, we... death is a fact. And we don’t know what happens after death. And I’m not pretending to know that you get a dial tone after death. I don’t know what happens after the physical brain dies. I don’t know what the relationship between consciousness and the physical world is. I don’t think anyone does know. Now I think there are many reasons to be doubtful of naïve conceptions about the soul, and about this idea that you could just migrate to a better place after death. But I simply don’t know about what... I don’t know what I believe about death. And I don’t think it’s necessary to know in order to live as sanely and ethically and happily as possible. I don’t think you get... You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don't know."

"The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you."

"many Muslims ... We’re just going to keep having big families, and eventually it’s going to be Eurabia, and the war will be won. There are people who really think in those terms, and they’re not necessarily just the people in the center of the bull’s-eye of Islamic infatuation."

"If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?"

"The truth is that religion, as we speak of it – Islam, Christianity, Judaism – is based on the claim that God dictates certain books. He doesn’t code software, he doesn’t produce films, he doesn’t score symphonies, he is an author. And this claim has achieved credibility because these books are deemed so profound they could not have possibly been written by human authors. Please consider for a moment how differently we treat scientific claims and texts and discoveries. Isaac Newton went into isolation for 18 months starting in the year 1665. When he came out of his solitude he had invented the calculus; he had discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation; he had single-handedly created the field of optics. No one thinks this was anything but a man’s labor. And it took 200 hundred years of continuous ingenuity on the part of some of the smartest people who ever lived to substantially improve upon Newton’s work. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? Anyone in this room could improve this supposedly inerrant text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually – in moments. If God loves us and wanted to guide us with a book of morality, it’s very strange to have given us a book that supports slavery, that demands that we murder people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft. The true basis for hope in our world is open-ended conversation, and religion has shattered our world into competing moral communities. What we have to convince ourselves of is – that love and curiosity is enough for us – and intellectual honesty is the guardian of that."

"Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance."

"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings."

"We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?"

"Muslim discourse is currently a tissue of myths, conspiracy theories, and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century."

"Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker."

"It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically."

"It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently—though isn't it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?"

"Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being." Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept."

"Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell's potential gets you absolutely nowhere."

"The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics."

"20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all."

"Atheism is not a philosophy - it is not even a view of the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."

"If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil."

"One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religious faith."

"Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization."

"You are happily being misunderstood in your use of the word "God"."

"The God that our neighbors believe in is essentially an invisible person. He’s a creator deity, who created the universe to have a relationship with one species of primates – lucky us. And he’s got galaxy upon galaxy to attend to, but he’s especially concerned with what we do, and he’s especially concerned with what we do while naked. He almost certainly disapproves of homosexuality. And he’s created this cosmos as a vast laboratory in which to test our powers of credulity, and the test is this: can you believe in this God on bad evidence, which is to say, on faith? And if you can, you will win an eternity of happiness after you die. And it's precisely this sort of god and this sort of scheme that you must believe in if you're going to have any kind of future in politics in this country, no matter what your gifts. You could be an unprecedented genius, you could look like George Clooney, you could have a billion dollars and you could have the social skills of Oprah and you are going nowhere in politics in this country, unless you believe in that sort of god."

""Religion" is a nearly useless term. It's a term like "sports". Now there are sports like Badminton and sports like Thai Boxing, and they have almost nothing in common apart from breathing. There are sports that are just synonymous with the risk of physical injury or even death … There is, I'm happy to say, a religion of peace in this world, but it's not Islam. The claim that Islam is a religion of peace that we hear ceaselessly reiterated is completely delusional. Now Jainism actually is a religion of peace. The core principle of Jainism is non-violence. Gandhi got his non-violence from the Jains. The crazier you get as a Jain, the less we have to worry about you. Jain extremists are paralysed by their pacifism. Jain extremists can't take their eyes off the ground when they walk lest they step on an ant... Needless to say they are vegetarian. So the problem is not religious extremism, because extremism is not a problem if your core beliefs are truly non-violent. The problem isn't fundamentalism. We often hear this said: these are euphemisms... The only problem with Islamic fundamentalism are the fundamentals of Islam."

"The connection between facts and values is straightforward and philosophically uninteresting... values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures; the well-being of conscious creatures is what can be valued in this universe... Now, here’s the one bit of philosophy I’m going to anchor this to: imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it can for as long as it can – I call this the worst possible misery for everyone. The worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word bad is to mean anything, surely it applies to the worst possible misery for everyone... the moment you grant me that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and therefore worth avoiding... well then you have every other possible constellation of conscious experience which, by definition, is better. So you have this continuum here of states of consciousness and given that consciousness is related to the way the universe is, it’s constrained by the laws of nature in some way, there are going to be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum... now this is, in philosophy, a somewhat controversial statement. I do not see how."

"The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time."

"Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience."

"As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to make conclusions about the nature of the cosmos based upon inner experience – no matter how profound these experiences seem."

"I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could have ever imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of Nature herself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and to be amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of these deeper possibilities... But as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep. My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever suffered—and they make the notion of hell, as a metaphor if not a destination, seem perfectly apt."

"The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime."

"Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape."

"Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations."

"Most of us do our best not to think about death. But there’s always part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, or a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us. Now, I’m sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form; you must know how uncanny it is to suddenly be thrown out of the normal course of your life and just be given the full time job of not dying, or of caring for someone who is... But the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. And it’s not just what they did with their time – it’s not just that they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal. This is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s going to come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you’ll think ‘What was I doing?’. You know this, and yet if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. Like, watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we’re going to waste our time like this."

"There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite... but it's the truth... As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives."

"Even when we think we are in the present moment we are in very subtle ways looking over its shoulder anticipating what's coming next. We're always solving a problem. And it's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present... This is not a matter of new information or more information. It requires a change in attitude. It requires a change in the attentiveness you pay to your experience in the present moment."

"If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?"

"From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings."

"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it. And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bull’s-eye (after all, what would Adam Gadahn look like if he cleaned himself up?) But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance."

"I describe it as anti-profiling. It's not that I want certain people profiled – I just want us to admit that certain people require less scrutiny, and Jerry Seinfeld is one. When you see a famous celebrity go through security, treated as though he may just have become a jihadist when no one was watching… It's crazy. It is security theatre."

"The illusion of free will... is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter."

"So you can't take credit for your talents, but it really matters if you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses and your failings, but it matters if you correct them. Pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analyses. But they were no fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense are things like compassion and love: caring about well-being makes sense; trying to maximize your well-being and the well-being of others makes sense. There is still a difference between suffering and happiness, and love consists in wanting those we love to be happy. All of that still makes sense without free will."

"Nothing that I've said makes social and political freedom any less valuable: having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. So the freedom to do what one wants is still precious. But the idea that we as conscious beings are deeply responsible for what we want I think needs to be revised: it just can't be mapped onto reality, neither objective nor subjective. And if we're going to be guided by reality, rather than by the fantasy lives of our antecessors, I think our view of ourselves needs to change."

"I think it [getting a gun] should be like getting a pilot's license. I think you should require training to get a license to have a gun."

"Your life doesn't get any better than your mind is: You might have wonderful friends, perfect health, a great career, and everything else you want, and you can still be miserable. The converse is also true: There are people who basically have nothing—who live in circumstances that you and I would do more or less anything to avoid—who are happier than we tend to be because of the character of their minds. Unfortunately, one glimpse of this truth is never enough. We have to be continually reminded of it."

"Meditation … puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness—a more refined version of the problem you already have."

"Many people who experience illness imagine that everyone else is blissfully getting on with life in perfect health—and this illusion compounds their suffering."

"[A]s I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: Muslim jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Liberals like [Glenn] Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of Islamophobia, display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. The best way to address this problem is by no means obvious. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global civil society, seems a very unlikely path to a solution."

"What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors, if they had neighbors who would live in peace with them. They would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way. This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don't want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It's just that some of us haven't realized it yet."

"Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the "self"—the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one's head—is an illusion."

"The self really is an illusion—and realizing this is the basis of spiritual life."

"Your mind is all you truly have."

"A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran."

"But what do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Koran on tonight's show? There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when ISIS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands—all in the name of Islam—the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag."

"We hear everywhere about this false trade-off between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as though there were some kind of balance to be struck here. There is no balance to be struck. Freedom of speech never infringes on freedom of religion. There is nothing I can say in this podcast about religion in general, or about Islam in particular, that would infringe upon someone else's freedom to practice his or her religion. If your freedom of religion entails that you force those who do not share it to conform to it, well that's not freedom of religion. We have a word for that – that's theocracy. This respect that we are all urged to show for "religious sensitivity" is actually a demand that the blasphemy laws of Islam be followed by non-muslims."

"I think the apostates, the intellectuals, the women, the gays of the Muslim world are the most important people in the world right now. If we could give greencards to every real secularist in the Muslim world, I think they should just get to the front of the line. These are the people who need to be empowered. The irony is that if they could leave the Muslim world… The Muslim world needs them, so the best thing would be to empower them in the Muslim world. […] Everything I say about Islam is a confession of solidarity with these people."

"[On being "genial, soft-spoken and unflappable" despite having "hard arguments"]: As far as my being friendly to most of my opponents, it comes from the fact that none of this is personal. I don't take any of this personal. I don't take any criticism of my ideas personal, and as far as I'm concerned, everything I believe is on the table and fit to be challenged. There's nothing I'm holding back, there's nothing that I'm holding sacred, such that if you were to doubt it, I would take your doubt personal, or I would see it as something that would diminish me personally."

"When I took to Twitter and I urged Hillary to speak clearly on this topic [Islamic terrorism, following the Orlando shootings in June 2016], I got attacked by even LGBT activists for my bigotry, for inspiring hate against Muslims. This is how confused the left is: just a few hours after this news broke, LGBT activists were so allergic to having someone name the belief system that had just produced a massacre in their community that they lashed out against me as a bigot rather than lash out against the people who won't name the belief system that at this moment is doing more than any other on earth to target gays and to force them into hiding."

"I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. [...] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are."

"On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice."

"Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths. I have argued elsewhere that the ascendancy of Christian conservatism in American politics should terrify and embarrass us. And yet, there are gradations to the evil that is done in name of God, and these gradations must be honestly observed. So let us now make sense of the impossible by acknowledging the obvious: there is a direct link between the doctrine of Islam and Muslim terrorism. Acknowledging this link remains especially taboo among political liberals.....While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization."

"Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.....As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword.....Yes, the Bible contains its own sadistic lunacy—but the above [Qur'an] quotations [taken from The End of Faith, pp. 117-123] can be fairly said to convey the central message of the Qur’an—and of Islam at nearly every moment in its history. The Qur’an does not contain anything like a Sermon on the Mount. Nor is it a vast and self-contradictory book like the Old Testament, in which whole sections (like Leviticus and Deuteronomy) can be easily ignored and forgotten. The result is a unified message of triumphalism, otherworldliness, and religious hatred that has become a problem for the entire world. And the world still waits for moderate Muslims to speak honestly about it."

"The penalty for apostasy is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest.....As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn’t also happen to have the Qur’an."

"Mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion."

"Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident."

"The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time."

"Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective... The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?" is generally a scientific one."

"Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos."

"To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication."

"Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves."

"Every lie haunts our future."

"Whatever its imagined virtues, faith is the enemy of open and honest inquiry. Remaining open to the powers of conversation - to new evidence and better arguments - is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love."

"Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next - a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please - your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this "decision" and believe that you are in the process of making it."

"Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose."

"You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm."

"To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe."

"But from a deeper perspective (speaking both objectively and subjectively), thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions."

"You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts."

"You are either lucky in this department or you aren't—and you cannot make your own luck."

"I do not choose to choose what I choose."

"Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck."

"The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior."

"There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren't born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments."

"It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions."

"Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world."

"Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."

"The conventional sense of self is an illusion—and [] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation."

"The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished."

"The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears."

"We wouldn't attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn't feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one's life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment."

"I never made more effort than I did when practicing under U Pandita. But most of this effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that I was seeking to overcome. The model of this practice is that one must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. But the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly, at the mountain's base or anywhere else along the path. One can then return to this insight, again and again, as one's sole method of meditation—thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice."

"Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations—changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met. During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life."

"[About the reactions to the attack on Israel in October 2023:] The moral, not just untenability, the abomination we're witnessing where you have the same people who are equally exercised over Halloween costumes that are cultural appropriation and their defending what happened in Israel last week. That dissonance, I think, is something we need to not lose sight of culture-wide."

"Mr. Harris argues cogently, pithily, wittily, passionately, that religious "faith" is leading humanity straight to a very earthly hell."

"The End of Faith is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land."

"His passion was for deep philosophical questions, and he could talk for hours and hours... Sometimes you'd want to say to him, 'What about the Yankees?' or 'Look at the leaves, they're changing color!'"

"Sam Harris, a Jewish warrior against theocracy and bigotry of all stripes, [...]."

"He makes his inevitable pilgrimage to the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition, though without pausing to acquaint himself with the Inquisition's actual history or any of the recent scholarship on it. He more or less explicitly states that every episode of violence in Christian history is a natural consequence of Christianity's basic tenets (which is obviously false), and that Christianity's twenty centuries of unprecedented and still unmatched moral triumphs – its care of widows and orphans, its alms-houses, hospitals, foundling homes, schools, shelters, relief organizations, soup kitchens, medical missions, charitable aid societies, and so on – are simply expressions of normal human kindness, with no necessary connection to Christian conviction (which is even more obviously false)."

"Reading Sam Harris is like drinking water from a cool stream on a hot day."

"For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their 'reflexive solidarity' with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work."

"Harris' self-loving mentality amounts to this: those primitive Muslims are so tribal for reflexively siding with their own kind, while I constantly tout the superiority of my own side and justify what We do against Them. How anyone can read any of these passages and object to claims that Harris' worldview is grounded in deep anti-Muslim animus is staggering. He is at least as tribal, jingoistic, and provincial as those he condemns for those human failings, as he constantly hails the nobility of his side while demeaning those Others."

"Manny Mota and Vic Davalillo have 100 years between them. The average age of our bench is deceased."

"I knew something was up when he couldn't go to his right. He said he was living his fantasy, and I said it was my fantasy to get his [rear] off the field."

"...I’ve moderated my hawkishness, but I’m still fairly much a military hawk. I mean, I thought Afghanistan was a perfectly justifiable war."

"Well, there’s just no doubt [that fighting and winning the war on terror is in the top three priorities]. I mean, there’s a real disagreement about how to best do that obviously. I mean, this all sounds great and, and, and wonderful, and obviously we can all get to—you know, we can all come around inequalities and opportunity and, and energy independence and that sort of thing."

"Tom, I'm a veteran. Okay? I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight a war I supported in Vietnam. I'm a veteran. They want a more effective V.A."

"I am basically a Clinton Democrat - perhaps more along the lines of how Clinton would have done things as benevolent dictator, or at least with a Dem Congress at his disposal, than how things were run in the 90s, but no flaming progressive."

"When I run into couples who recognize me, it’s usually the women who are the most friendly. Once, at a Greek restaurant in New York City, a huge family was seated at a table nearby. Late in the evening, the grandmother stood up and said, ‘Tera, I love you! I watch you all night long!’ Her daughter almost had a heart attack out of embarrassment. The grandma replied, ‘Honey, I may be old, but I’m not dead yet!’"

"I was really interested in being a model when I was a little girl. I loved all the pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. I loved watching old movies -- I was really into Bettie Page, she was a big role model to me. I've always looked up to models like Elaine Irwin and Stephanie Seymour. I've always loved modeling."

"It's really funny because we have this rule that the day before we shoot a movie, we don't have sex at all. You've got to be prepared and you have to have all your energy. But when we come home, we are usually pretty chill. We relax a little bit, we eat, he catches up on e-mail, I catch up on Law & Order, and then we hop into bed together. Then he is all over me again, he's like 'C'mon, let's do it' and I'm like 'Okay.' Especially after a girl-on-girl scene, he really gets riled up!"

"I mean we live in a society full of double standards and hypocritical paradox. I don't understand why the ultra conservatives in America have a problem with a porn star being portrayed in a videogame. I mean, there is no nudity, and the game will be rated accordingly. I mean kids play games where senseless killing is ok (like Grand Theft Auto, or even BYW2), and no one questions people jumping off the roof and slamming someone's face into an abandoned car, or shooting little old ladies! No one ever need kill anyone in real life, yet sex is something that everyone, except maybe Dick Cheney, will experience as a positive thing in their lifetime! People need to relax! I want to design and star in a real adult videogame! Let people get their sexual frustrations out!"

"I treat the business like a business because I have a business mind. I really enjoy my work and my scenes and I think that's part of the reason why I haven't gotten burned out. I've been able to pick and choose to a great extent and that helps. Since I do have a nursing career to fall back on, I am not really forced to be in the business. I stay because I truly enjoy the work."

"I had always wanted to be in an adult movie. It turned me on to think I would be having sex and a lot of men would be watching me."

"I was always very outgoing. I have always loved to be in front of the camera, very talkative, very extraverted, like I am now. My little brother is seven and he is exactly the same. People always told me I should be an actress. I still love working in front of the camera, I love taking photographs and I prefer modeling to acting. Acting is something you have to learn over years. I have a background in fashion and still love doing fashion photography. I also love doing nudes. They are an extension of fashion to me. You can see in my pictures that I love to work the camera. That shows in your face."

"I’m not saying I don’t like women, I just don’t like having hard-core sex with them. I’ve done lots of soft-core stuff with women and I’m fine. But no, you won’t see Janine strapping it on and doing me."

"I’ve noticed that the majority of my fans respect me as a woman. I’m the girl who came along that a lot of women were waiting for. They don’t have to be intimidated by me. They can relate to me because I’m not just some bimbo. I’m not implying that the majority of the women in the business are, I just think they see in me a woman who treats the business like a business yet can act slutty. A lot of the girls don’t respect their fans. I’ve had so many people say thank you for taking the extra time to talk to me. This is why I got into entertainment. I thrive on being in front of the camera and I love to give something to people. I have couples come up and say ‘we’re like you, we’re educated and have jobs, but we are into wild kinky sex.’ A lot of men will show my movies to their girlfriends because they think their girlfriends are going to like me because I’m not intimidating. I’m proud to be setting a good standard for this business."

"I’m tall, I have real boobs, I’m Asian and I have dark hair."

"I look for a man who is very confident. I like intelligent and am drawn to men with a strong science background. I think the only conventionally handsome guy I have ever been attracted to was Steve McQueen, but that was just his tough guy thing. I love European guys and I LOVE Firemen! I love a guy who can do crazy things with me and laugh, and did I mention that I love Firemen."

"Some guys think I'm a racist because I never did a scene with a black or Asian guy ... I just laugh."

"I have worked without them in the past, but I do advocate condom use....I think it’s a matter of personal choice. The industry has set some high standards as far as the testing. Beyond that, it’s up to the performers to keep themselves healthy. I tell the girls who I talk to, if you’re going to protect yourself with a guy on a one night stand, why not protect yourself with a guy you’re going to work with who you’ve known for five minutes?"

"That’s really hard. I am who I am. I don’t really change on camera and I think that’s what a lot of my fans respect about me. I don’t see anything wrong with a beautiful, intelligent girl being sexual and nasty. I can do a rough hard-core sex scene, then do a lecture on DNA. That’s just who I am."

"One of my favorite sex scenes was with TT Boy. He throws me up on a stairwell and rapes me. I had two orgasms which was pretty intense. Plus we were outside in the heat so that kind of added more to it, and there were people watching. That really was a turn on."

"Some girlfriends of mine wanted to pose for Playboy and they asked me to send my pictures in too. I didn't think anything of it -- I was just like, 'Sure, whatever.' I didn't think they would call me back the next day. They were like, 'You have an exotic look and we are interested in shooting you.' I can't explain it but it must have been in the cards or something. I never did pursue anything mainstream. I went and posed for Playboy, then a week later I ended up meeting Suze Randall who shot me for Penthouse and Hustler -- it was just a whirlwind from there. I ended up only being published in Playboy in a foreign edition because it came out in Penthouse at the same time. I think that had I only been published in Playboy, I might have gone down another road."

"It's true, that's how your mind works. I can tell you that honestly, because I own an agency and I talk to girls all day and all night about what they want to do, and they are like, "I want to go into mainstream" and I tell them, "You are at the wrong agency; you are not going to get into mainstream through porn -- it's just not how it works." I think girls like Jenna Jameson and I have crossed over and made it, but mainstream is still kind of shaky once you've been in adult. After doing those magazines I started doing movies and it wasn't a big leap, like you said." do not play a gain what I am doing."

"No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots."

"I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. "Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette," she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself."

"What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the "right" answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the "Accutrac personality test," which warns at the beginning that "Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or 'psych out' the questionnaire." Naturally, I "never" find it hard "to stop moods of self-pity," nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals." The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us."

"In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap — as measured by the pay — that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can."

"Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple."

"At Wal-Mart, a co-worker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to "know too much," or at least never to reveal one's full abilities to management, because "the more they think you can do, the more they'll use you and abuse you." My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day."

"If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."

"The appropriate emotion is shame — shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else."

"(War) has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures."

"our incestuous fixation on combat with our own kind has left us ill prepared to face many of the larger perils of the situation in which we find ourselves: the possibility of drastic climatic changes, the depletion of natural resources, the relentless predations of the microbial world. The wealth that flows ceaselessly to the project of war is wealth lost, for the most part, to the battle against these threats. In the United States, military spending no longer requires a credible enemy to justify it, while funding for sanitation, nutrition, medical care, and environmental reclamation declines even as the need mounts. In the third world and much of the postcommunist world, the preparedness for war far surpasses the readiness to combat disease-witness Zaire's fumbling efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak of 1995, or the swiftly declining life expectancy of the former Soviets."

"it is a giant step from hating the warriors to hating the war, and an even greater step to deciding that the "enemy" is the abstract institution of war, which maintains its grip on us even in the interludes we know as peace."

"for all their failings, anti-war movements should already have taught us one crucial lesson: that the passions we bring to war can be brought just as well to the struggle against war."

"So, Barbara once wrote, “In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty.” And so, that meant you had, in the ’90s and the ’00s, columnists and pundits tossing off columns about so-called deadbeat dads detached from their second homes, right? What she wanted was she wanted to see people who were up close to the experience, who had — themselves either had grown up working poor or were still working in factories, and were professional journalists, as well. And also she wanted to see professional journalists spend weeks, months, years reporting from the frontlines of economic jeopardy. I think it’s really important to think of her as a journalist and an activist. She didn’t necessarily see the bright line that other kind of so-called great journalists tend to see, right? That in the mainstream media, you’re not supposed to have a take or an opinion or a voice. She thought the opposite was true, that you needed to have people who are able to speak truth to power contributing to all of the conversations. So, she was co-chair, actually, of the DSA in early years, and it’s really important to recognize that. She was also part of women’s movements, labor movements. She felt they went hand in hand with the kind of critical writing she did. They were not separate entities. She understood that, on a basic level, people just needed higher wages and more money, basically. And to make this into a moral or personal vendetta against the poor was an obscenity. And she dedicated much of her life to creating media around that"

"So much of this book (For Her Own Good) is so devastatingly informative and is written with such lucid feminist wit, that I kept waiting as I read for the basic proscription against lesbianism to be examined. It never was…"False consciousness" can, I agree, be used as a term of dismissal for any thinking we don't like or adhere to. But, as I tried to illustrate in some detail, there is a real, identifiable system of heterosexual propaganda, of defining women as existing for the sexual use of men, which goes beyond "sex role" or "gender" stereotyping or "sexist imagery" to include a vast number of verbal and nonverbal messages. And this I call "control of consciousness." The possibility of a woman who does not exist sexually for men-the lesbian possibility-is buried, erased, occluded, distorted, misnamed, and driven underground. The feminist books-Chodorow, Dinnerstein, Ehrenreich and English, and others-which I discuss at the beginning of my essay contribute to this invalidation and erasure, and as such are part of the problem."

"The leftist writer Barbara Ehrenreich posted on Facebook that Clinton was "an elitist snob who writes off about a quarter of the American electorate as pond scum.""

"The biggest thing I learned was, especially the way I operate and how I am as a person, if I'm going to do a creative endeavor, I need to have full, complete control. Top to bottom. And with my book and website, I always had that. With the website, definitely, with the book, basically, with the movie...I didn't in a lot of ways. Nils and I, we had a lot of control, more control probably than almost any first time movie makers do within a normal studio system. We were in the middle between independent and not, because someone else paid for everything, and they kind of let us do what we wanted, but then once the movie was done creatively, it went in a direction that I did not want it to go, and there was nothing I could really do about it. It's hard enough to swim in that movie current by yourself, but when you've got weights tied to you and someone pulling you in a different direction, it's almost impossible. You need to pick a direction and go with it. If you're going to be a big studio movie, go be that, and if you're going to go be a rogue independent film, go be that. We had different people with different levels of authority on the movie that pulled us in different directions, and it just doesn't work. Either be in control or let someone else do it, but don't...too many chefs. I'm going to be better next time. Failure instructs, failure improves. Failure shouldn't deter you, unless you're just bad at it."

"I turned down $2 million for this script. There's absolutely no way that had I filmed the script through a major studio they would have done anything but fuck this movie up. They would have cut all the balls off the comedy, they would have put Seth Rogen and Dane Cook in it, they would have changed Tucker to make him fall in love, and all this stupid shit that would have driven me up a fucking wall."

"I try to make them understand it's not about getting pussy, it's about having fun. It's not about getting drunk, it's about being with your friends. It's not about dishing out put downs, it's about the thrill that comes with improving a witty line. It's not about being an asshole, it's about refusing to let others define your life. It's ultimately about being the person you want to be, and all the manic happiness that comes with that."

"Redheadedcalin doll: Doll comes with an innocent smile. Pull her string and doesn't speak, she just opens her legs."

"You see, I have fucked an amputee and a set of twins. If you add in a midget, you are looking at a legendary trifecta. How many other people can say they have done that? Seriously, raise your hand if you even know someone who has done that. Yeah, some of you have fucked midgets. Some of you have fucked amputees. Some have even fucked a set of twins. But how many can honestly say you have done all three categories? I'm not going to say that I'm the only guy on earth who has done this, but I would bet you could fit all of us into a Prius."

"I gave her an unmistakable "I want to fuck you" look, she shot me back a quick "My spine hurts" face, and I was smitten."

"EEK EEK EEK!! That's dolphin for 'I'm sorry.' But you already knew that.."

"Hey man, so can you speak to dolphins and pilot whales with that forehead of yours?"

"Tucker: You guys going to Milwaukee? Guy: Yes sir, heading home after a vacation. Tucker: Did you know there are midgets in Milwaukee? [The man and his wife are silent and confused.] Tucker: HUNDREDS OF THEM!"

"Nose full of fart, mouth full of cock, she never even paused."

"I'm sorry, but I stand by my decision. I am now a member of the elite club of people that have fought a professional team mascot. You sir, are not in that club."

"You ever wake up in the middle of the night because a couple of cats are clawing each other to death outside your window? That's what it's like listening to you speak."

"What are you looking for, McSeaBass? Its been the same menu for 40 years. Its all McShit. Just fucking order!"

"9:00: I don't know what I want. I just point at the Dollar Menu and say, 'Give me all of that.'"

"KJ: Jesus Christ, you are amazing. Where did you learn to fuck like that? TM: Home schooling."

"...and that we were now those guys...who started a fight at a Harry Potter book party."

"Great Holy Jesus--it looks like he fell into Kentucky Fried Movie."

"I was very thirsty. Laying in the bathtub, looking up at the faucet, I thought of a great idea. So I turned the nozzle on full blast, and put my mouth up to it. It was like drinking from a firehose, but I was too drunk and dehydrated to notice that I was getting completely soaked, or that water was shooting out of my nose."

"I have about half a second to make a crucial decision: I can either sprint and hope I make it there before I shit in my boxers, or I can stick my thumb up into my ass and shuffle the 60 yards to lavatory freedom."

"Tucker: Do you hate the World Bank? Girl: Uhh, umm, well, I mean, yeah, I feel that... Tucker: You don't hate the World Bank. Girl: I don't? Tucker: No. You're mad at your father. You just want daddy to hug you more. Girl: What? Tucker: You were a sociology major weren't you? Girl: NO! Tucker: What was your major? Girl: [Pauses] Uhhh, English Literature. Tucker: [Pause--to give her a look of contempt] Did your parents send you a bill for college? How are those Marxist Literary Critique classes working out for you? You work at Barnes and Noble don't you? Girl: NO--I wor-- Tucker: Shouldn't you be blocking an intersection right now? How many anti-sweatshop petitions have you signed--EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE REEBOKS ON. Very-anti globalization to wear those with your animal tested Clinque make-up made in Nepal. Well, at least you're consistent in your shameless hypocrisy. Girl: What a fascist piece of shi-- Tucker: You ever wake up in the middle of the night because a couple of cats are clawing each other to death outside your window? That's what it's like listening to you speak. Girl: [A mishmash of stammered half insults] Tucker: Seriously--If I stuck my dick in your mouth would that shut you up? Girl: Wha...YOU ARE SUCH AN ASSHOLE! Tucker: HEY--Don't blame me for the wound in your crotch. [As I walk off] By the way, you owe us a rib."

"I am Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds."

"We can't get kicked out of McDonald's! This is like the DMZ of drunk eating."

"Hi. I haven't insulted you yet, have I?"

"Tucker: Are you married? Girl: Yes. Tucker: How good is the marriage? Girl: Very good. Tucker: So there is no chance of us hooking up? Girl: No. Tucker: Well, do you have any hot friends who aren't fucking prudes? Hey--where are you going? I was only kidding! I respect the sanctity of the monogamous relationship! WHORE!"

"Tucker: WHERE IS THE BATHROOM? Janitor: No, no se habla Ingles. Tucker: WHAT?!? Huh, uh...DONDE ESTA FUCKING BANO? Janitor: AYA, AYA!"

"Tucker: I understand how female porn stars are selected, but if you are guy, and you don't have a huge cock or shoot 8-ropers, how do you get into the porn industry? Mermaid: Networking, dude, networking. Stripper: I don't know. I just fucked whoever they told me to. It paid good. Tucker: Well isn't that pleasant? I bet your parents are beaming with pride."

"The Cousin: Hey Tucker, you know she's French, don't you? Tucker: Oh hell no--You're French? Girl: My parents are, but I was born here. I want to move to France after graduation. Tucker: You fucking cheese-eating surrender monkey. I thought someone stunk around here. So if I start speaking German can I push you around and take all your stuff? Those hairy fucking stink-bags would be speaking Kraut right now if it wasn't for us, and they aren't the least bit appreciative. I hope they all fucking die, and your frog-sympathizing ass with them."

"Yinzer: DAMN!! I wish I had your balls! Tucker:"I wish you had a breath mint, but I guess we don't always get what we wish for."

"Every girl asked me, "What makes you god's gift to women?" Some answers: 13 inches. Who ever thought it could be too big? I have 20 million dollars and terminal cancer. I like to listen. I'm a convicted sex offender. Have you seen this face? Look at how hot I am! I like to cut up hookers. Bend over and I'll show you."

"The Academy should give Caitlin a fucking Oscar. She delivered her scripted lines perfectly, even improvising beautifully with the "Uncle Tucker" bit. And I should get an award for choreography or something."

"A girl said this to me last night: "You aren't at all what I expected. I thought you would be more suave and debonair." That statement by itself isn't all that funny, until you put it into context: She said it to me as we were laying in bed, having just fucked three times. That was two hours after I met her."

"Here’s to the people we’ve met, And to the people we’ve fucked, And to those of us Who’ve had no such luck. Here’s to beer in the glass, And vodka in the cup. Here’s to pokin’ her in the ass So she won’t get knocked up. Here’s to all of you, And here’s to me, Together as friends we’ll always be. But if we should ever disagree, Then FUCK ALL OF YOU, HERE’S TO ME!"

"To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse."

"Give me enough words, enough attendant gravity, and I might fall into myself forever, crushed infinitely flat by my own hubris. It'd be a neat trick, I admit. I'd pay to see it — but from a safe distance, of course."

"I've seen so goddamn much — I've seen so much that there's no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can't be anything left that's more terrible than what has come before."

"Orpheus' mistake wasn't that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot's wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked."

"I sincerely hope I'm not as big a fool as that. Whatever else I may be, I like to think that I'm not an idiot."

"The divine is always abominable."

"And speaking of Massachusetts, I just heard on CNN that the first human cloning has been successfully performed there. I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of cloning humans (or anything else), but I have to question the need for any technology that produces more of us. Making babies is about the only thing for which our species seems to display a more or less universal talent. We hardly need any help."

"I was thinking, earlier, how there's this stigma attached to "writing for money" and how odd that is, as though writing is akin to sex (another "creative" act?) and writing for money is akin to prostitution in the minds of so many people. Whoring with adjectives, so to speak. Do I give good prose? Look up the definition of "hack." So, there must be the perception that writing, like the priesthood, comes with some higher purpose in tow. Getting paid well somehow sullies the purer cause. I've heard writers dismiss something or another that they've written by explaining, "Oh, yes, I know that sucked, but I only wrote it because they paid me so much money." And then we might even forgive them a piece of crap, because we have a sensible explanation. That wasn't a real orgasm. I was only faking the plot. Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Hollywood."

"The world wants oatmeal. It is not my job to give the world oatmeal. It is my job not to be a hack. It is my job to try to make the world chew, lest its lazy jaw muscles atrophy and its collective mandible withers and all its teeth fall out. It is my job, as a writer, to give the world toffee and peanut brittle and tough steak and celery. I write peanut butter sandwiches, not oatmeal. And every time some dolt whines, "I'm confused" or "I don't understand" or "This doesn't make any sense," I should smile and know that I'm doing my job. Not because it is my job to be opaque, but because it is not my job to be transparent."

"A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg."

"I'm not kidding, and I'm not being hyperbolic — sometimes I hate this thing I do more than I could ever say. Sometimes, it seems that I spend my days dragging people whose only crime is that I am their creator through the filth and pain and degradation of my own despicable imagination. Where is the good in this? Where is the resolution? Where is the sense of it? If I had even a scintilla of belief in a "higher" intelligence of any sort, days like yesterday (and, by extension, today) would, on the one hand, give me some degree of sympathy for the idiot dieties unable to craft a better universe, and, on the other hand, it makes me grateful I have no such beliefs, because the anger I would have for that "higher" whatever would be inexpressible. And I cannot imagine that there are actually people out there — self-professed "horror" writers — who are trying to elicit these emotions in others, who are purposefully driving their characters on through all the futile, dead-end nightmares that might be devised. I would not do this. I swear I would not do this, if I could find other words in me."

"No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few exceptions, a brutal, ugly, and unrelentingly difficult existence. It is a grind, no matter how much you may love to write or feel driven to tell stories. Personal demons aside, you will encounter at almost every turn no shortage of idiots and shitheels upon whom you must depend to get your work to readers. Occasionally, there will be a fortunate aberration: a wonderful, brilliant editor, or a copyeditor who doesn't try to express herhimitself vicariously by attempting to rewrite your work, or an agent who busts hisherits ass for you. You may even be so fortunate as to encounter a publisher who cares more about herhisits authors than the bottom line. Those things do happen. But don't ever fucking count on it. If you come to this life, and if you "make it" and can actually eek out some sort of living writing, you will likely learn these things for yourselves. Plenty of people will tell you I'm full of shit on this account. And you are certainly free to listen to whomever you please. But after fourteen years as a full-time writer, during which time I have had great successes and profound failures, seen modest fortune and considerable poverty and everything in-between, been appreciated and reviled, awarded and ignored, helped and hindered — one thing remains true. It's a tough row to hoe, as my Grandfather Ramey would have said. And you do yourself and all working authors a disservice if you dare believe otherwise."

"On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day."

"There are many words and phrases that should be forever kept out of the hands of book reviewers. It's sad, but true. And one of these is "self-indulgent." And this is one of those things that strikes me very odd, like reviewers accusing an author of writing in a way that seems "artificial" or "self-conscious." It is, of course, a necessary prerequisite of fiction that one employ the artifice of language and that one exist in an intensely self-conscious state. Same with "self-indulgent." What could possibly be more self-indulgent than the act of writing fantastic fiction? The author is indulging her- or himself in the expression of the fantasy, and, likewise, the readers are indulging themselves in the luxury of someone else's fantasy. I've never written a story that wasn't self-indulgent. Neither has any other fantasy or sf author. We indulge our interests, our obsessions, and assume that someone out there will feel as passionately about X as we do."

"Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst."

"I want to build vast machines of light and darkness, intricate mechanisms within mechanisms, a progression of gears and cogs and pistons each working to its own end as well as that of the Greater Device. That's what I see in my head. But, too often, I sense that many readers want nothing more complex or challenging than wind-up toys. It's dispiriting."

"The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she — the author — should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary."

"Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap."

"Isn't there some great, grim irony in the fact that the whole country gets a day off work in honor of a man who struggled against and died to end oppression, even after having re-elected one of the greatest would-be oppressors of the last century? And that the threat of freedom for a minority may have been what finally tipped the electoral scales in Dominar Bush's favor? Yes, I think that's what it is, a great, grim irony. King said, "No one is free until we are all free." Somehow, the Reverend Bernice King has missed that part, as have so many other Americans. All or nothing. Personally, I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should have been suspended this year in recognition of Bush's second term. A nation cannot simultaneously pat itself on the back for granting this group of people freedom and strive to deny freedom to this other group. Or, rather, it can, but it should not be permitted to do so. The vacation has not been earned because the work is not finished."

"All I have to do is make you see this. This one particular thing here. That's all. And sometimes it's impossible. Sometimes, I know the best odds I can hope for are a thousand to one. You'll see what you see, what your life has conditioned you to see upon encountering that combination of words, not what I want or need you to see. Fiction writing is like making films for the blind."

"[On test audiences and alternate endings on DVDs] Seeing these two endings, knowing that the studio most likely chose the one that would close the film after polling test audiences, makes me a little ill. What if I did that with my novels? What would you think of me, if I were to so subvert the act of storytelling and mythmaking in an effort to make more money (by, I might add, perverting democracy)? Okay, at the end of Low Red Moon, I can kill Chance, or I can let her live. Which ending do you prefer? Check the box, and let us know. Should Orpheus make it back to the surface without looking to see if Eurydice is truly following him, or should he look? Should the mouse pull the thorn from the lion's paw, or should he mind his own damned business? I can only hope that it is self-evident that this process is as alien and destructive to art as anything ever could be. Yes, I'm sure it makes people more money, and money is nice, but it has very little to do with telling good and true and useful stories."

"At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right. There are only finer and lesser degrees of refinement, and even those are probably subjective. You might think it's perfect for a time, but read it a year or five years later, and you'll see you were mistaken. There's always something I can make better, every time I read one of my stories. Usually there are dozens of somethings. And I once thought this wasn't true, that a story reached a certain point and beyond that point you were only changing things, making them different, not making them better. Indeed, I thought, beyond a point, you risk screwing it all up. I don't think that anymore. You risk screwing it all up right from the start, and no story is ever as perfect as it can be. Perfection is always one or two polishes away from the writer."

"Art should never be a slave to commerce, but for all working artists that's exactly what it must be."

"Yesterday was an utter waste. An artist, of whatever stripe, has only so many days, to write or paint or dance or whatever, and each one wasted is that much that will never be accomplished."

"Sometimes, I think that the most alien thing to mankind is mankind itself. The real aliens live next door or across the border or somewhere overseas. Each man and woman defines the world about them, creating a set of those things which they consider "normal" and "good" and "evil" and "sympathetic" and "likable," and these are damned indomitable walls. They are high and thick, and it is the task of the writer to penetrate or scale them. To break in. To shatter preconceptions. To force people to rethink cherished opinions and prejudices."

"I'm not sure if erotica should be angry and grim and terrifying and bitter, but it works for me. I rode my frustration. I kicked the bitch in the ribs until it spat up what I needed."

"Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe."

"If there must be resolution and explanation, it must be something worth its weight in mystery. Most times, I'd be content with the mystery."

"Basically, I wish I could read the way I used to read. I did not dissect as I read. I simply became immersed in the story and let it sweep me happily along. Now I cannot help but dissect. I try not to, but I do anyway. I cannot help but see "flaws" and all the ways I think I could have done this better. I would suspect that all writers are like this, to one degree or another. Writers are the gods of their universes, and we are never at a loss to suggest how some other god might better run herhisits universe/s. At least, this is true of me. It is one reason I read so much less fiction than I did fifteen years ago. And, actually, stage magic is not a bad metaphor for this problem I now have as a reader. I am precisely like a magician watching another magician's act. I should be suckered in with the rest of the crowd. I passionately desire to have the wool pulled over my eyes. Only it very rarely happens, as I'm too busy figuring out how it's all being done and how I could improve upon it … I just can't help but read it as a novelist. This is, from my perspective, unfortunate. I don't want to know how the trick works. I want to be amazed. I want to be convinced of the magic. But this is what I do. I spend my days gluing words together to try and fool other people. And I can't help but try to see how other writers, especially writers who have found more commercial success than have I, make it work. Sadly, I don't even find the mechanics & theory of fiction writing remotely interesting, which makes this doubly frustrating. It's just a reflex."

"Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus. And unlike science, art is not progressive. Personally, I have my doubts that science can be said to be genuinely progressive, but I'm pretty dammed certain that art is not. Which is not to say that it is not accumulative or accretionary. But the belief that sf writers are out there forecasting the future, that they have some social responsibility to do so, that's malarky, if you ask me. Writers of sf can only, at best, make educated guesses, and usually those guesses are wrong, and clumping together to form a consensus does not in any way insure against history unfolding in one of those other, unpredicted directions. People love to pick out the occasional instances where Jules Verne and William Gibson got it right; they rarely ever point fingers at their miscalls."

"I pondered exactly how future biographers would go about writing the biographies of authors without letters. It's not like email and "chat" and whatnot will fill the void. Online journals help a little, but they are not, generally, the truly honest sorts of things that letters were, and only a few authors keep them. I tried for years to keep up letter writing, but was defeated in the end by too many unreliable correspondents."

"Bad writing days are days when you mean to write and can't, or are interrupted so frequently that nothing gets done. I'm disheartened at how often I see the blogs of aspiring writers bemoaning how slowly a book or story is coming along. They have somehow gotten it in their heads that writing is a thing done quickly, efficiently, like an assembly line with lots of shiny robotic workers. The truth, of course, is that writing is usually slow, and inefficient, and more like trying to find a cube of brown Jello that someone's carelessly dropped into a pig sty. Five hundred words in a day is good. So is a thousand. Or fifteen hundred. A good writing day is a day when one has written well, and the word counts be damned. Finishing is not the goal. Doing the job well is the goal. And I say that as someone with no means of financial support but her writing, as someone who is woefully underpaid for her writing, and as someone with so many deadlines breathing down her neck that she can no longer tell one breather from the other. Sometimes, I forget this, that daily word counts are irrelevant, that writing is not a race to the finish line. One need only write well if one wishes to be a writer. A day when one does not do her best merely so that more may be written, that's a bad writing day."

"A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be."

"It has been my experience that many people actually believe that writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration. Maybe this is the source of that annoying "Where do you get your ideas from?" question. Maybe the people who believe writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration are the same people who ask that question, thinking — wrongly — that there's a trick of some sort involved. And if a writer would but tell them the trick, then they too would have access to the bottomless well of ideas and live in a state of perpetual inspiration. In my case, at least, there is no bottomless fucking well of ideas, and if I only wrote when I truly felt inspired, I'd starve and live in a cardboard box at the corner of Crack and Whore (which is to say, the corner of Ponce and Piedmont). But, that said, there does have to be a spark. What people ought to be asking me is "Where do you get those tiny, little infinitesimally faint sparks that you then somehow manage to blow up into ideas?" Of course, my answer would be, "I have no inkling whatsoever.""

"I cannot force it. I have never been able to force it. Like I've said before, writing is a wild magic (at least it is for me). It comes when it's ready, and then, if I'm lucky, I have some small say in where it goes and what it does. This is one reason I can't comprehend why some writers talk so much about "craft." Crafts are something you learn how to do. I never learned to write. I write better now than I did ten years ago, and far better than I did twenty years ago, but I'm not exactly sure why. To me, it is an almost ineffable thing. I try to explain what it is I do, and how it is I do it … on those extremely rare occasions when I try to explain … and, for me, it's like grasping at air. I have no craft talk, no theory, no dos and don'ts, no discernible process. I sit here in my chair at my desk in front of the iMac, and when I'm lucky, it happens. It's not so much that I think the "writing as craft" people are wrong. They can't be wrong, not if they are crafting stories and know they are crafting stories. But I don't craft stories. So, for me, we have here these two different paradigms. I spark. They craft. Two incommensurable world views. I cannot explain to them what it is that I do. I cannot even explain it to myself. And I cannot comprehend what they do."

"We are indeed living at the end of the Golden Age of Mankind, or at least the end of this particular human civilization. That almost everything we take for granted today may, only a couple of decades farther along, seem entirely remarkable, that our most mundane artefacts and toys will stand as incredible examples of luxury and excess. That all of this will pass away, and the "simplest" bits of our day-to-day lives will become miracles of a half-remembered past. A past which will be responsible for that future-present misery. It is difficult to force myself through the trivial routine of my days when these thoughts are front and center. It is difficult to see beyond the veil they draw up about me and difficult to push it all aside long enough to write my silly little stories."

"I'm wondering how the new crop of teens and twentysomethings became so afraid of emotion and the expression thereof.* Did their parents teach them? Did they learn it somewhere else? Is this a spontaneous cultural phenomenon? Are they afraid of appearing weak? Is this capitalism streamlining the human psyche to be more useful by eliminating anything that might hamper productivity? Is it a sort of conformism? I don't know, but I could go the rest of my life and never again hear anyone whine about someone else being "emo," and it would be a Very Good Thing."

"Could anything be more inimical to art than a fear of emotion, or a fear of "excessive" emotion, or a reluctance to express emotion around others? No, of course not. Art can even best the weights of utter fucking ignorance and totalitarian repression, but it cannot survive emotional constipation. I want a T-shirt that says, "Art is Emo." We live in an age where people are more apt to believe a thing if they read it on a T-shirt."

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in."

"I’ve never acted my age and I never will. It’s just the way I’ve always been."

"Sometimes I’m misunderstood and it’s hard to come by that. My life has been full of excitement. I’ve done pretty much what I wanted to do. I came from the Midwest, from South Dakota, and I came up the hard way. We lived on a farm; we didn’t even have electricity or running water if you know what I mean. People don’t know what that life is like."

"Marilyn came along in the 1950s. She really opened the door for me. When I got my contract at Universal, I was their answer to Marilyn Monroe. They made my hair platinum, and they gave me a lot of sexy roles—dumb roles, actually."

"The studio didn’t really know how to groom a female star because they only had male stars ... they didn’t know what to do with a well-endowed blonde, except giving her dumb roles."

"She [Marilyn Monroe] was so vulnerable to the world, but what a sweet person she really was, lovable, compassionate—I have nothing but grace for Marilyn, and she should have been at least nominated for an Academy Award for Bus Stop.. But in those days, they preferred to nominate the Bette Davis kind of stars."

"You know, talking about Marilyn Monroe is strange. To me, she’s a person; to most people, she’s an idea."

"In films, she [Jayne Mansfield] played mostly character roles, while Marilyn did more sophisticated movies, and I did several rock 'n roll movies. The three of us were often compared, maybe because we had blonde hair, but all three of us were very different."

"They said I wasn’t the type for it, so they put a dark blonde wig on me. They wanted me to look like Grace Kelly with breasts."

"... in those days, there were hardly any women who headlined movies. Men always had first billing, unless it was a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis movie. But I starred in most of my so-called B movies."

"I have done A movies too, but I preferred doing B movies—if that’s what people want to call them, then so be it. Elvis Presley did B movies; Jack Nicholson did B movies,… So when I am referred to as ‘The Queen of the B Movies,’ I leave that to the person who reads it."

"Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, and get enough sleep. A healthy lifestyle will increase your lifespan considerably."

"And as the mouthpieceOf every single citizen without peaceDirection and leadershipI'ma spit it 'til your ears can't believe this shitWe got weapons of mass destruction, and we is it"

"I wish the government would quit tappin' phones in the ghetto(Leave us alone) I wish my student loans were all settledI wish they'd quit riggin' elections, the shit is depressin'Bet your bottom dollar Bush wins again, no questionI wish AIDS didn't existI wish I didn't have flashbacks of my cousin slittin' his wristsI wish there weren't so many single mothers and deadbeat dadsYeah"

"You mad at the last album, I apologize for itYo, I can't call it, man muh'fuckin' Wyclef spoiled it"

"Two roads diverged in a wood, I took the one less travelledI'm patient so that's one less hassleIf I dream it, I can live itI've seen the light with vivid imageryI need to write with fits of energyBut it's hard tryin' to get where I'm goin'Without a hint or an omenIt's too late to turn aroundPerseverance, gotta learn it nowBut I'm stubborn howAm I supposed to survive this rollercoaster hurtlin' to the ground?"

"I guess it's true what they say, the third time's a charmI grabbed the game and let it die in my armsThen resurrected itChanged clothes, same flow, perfected itThey know Swain though they still won't respect the kidBut I ain't slowin' upThis time, blowin' upSponsors, concerts, everybody showin' upKnow enough tricks of the trade to get a record deal:Fresh kicks, press kits, sex appealHad to mail my demo out 'cause I ain't had enough bus passTo take the bus first classSo frustrated, had to puff-puff-passSent my CD out to Puff, Puff passedMust've had enough trash on his desk this yearSent one to So So Def, but it fell on so so deaf earsI never once shed tears, this must be a test here"

"D. Swain ain't never dwell on shitSo why would he start now?The perfect time for him to depart, vowedTo make a name for myselfGet some fame, maybe gain some wealth (what else?)I gave you the pain of a black man going through thangsJust being myself and showing you SwainNow a nigga feelin' disenchanted, jaded'Cause instead of gettin' props, Danny got hatedYeah I made it to the top, but I'm tossin' myself offD. Swain kill his image? Chalk it up as a lossGoodbye"

"So one time for my disillusioned artists, I hear yaTwo times for the kid that air-guitars in the mirrorThree times for the 9-to-5-in' bus ridin' dudesAnd four times for my dreamers, yo I'm just like youThat's why I sing for my queens with their own pair of wingsMy brothers flyin' beside me, drama behind meMama tried to find me, she inquired emphaticallyI was in the sky with all these other ghetto kids, defying gravity, uh"

"Tribe purist to the fullestIf'n you ain't feelin' this track, then you're full of itPull that li'l shit if you wanna, ya digBut you ain't gonna do me like you did those Kidz, and clown meHomage, comma, propsCall it what you want, but I'm not gonna stopRecord hit the store and I'm not gonna flopAnd if I do, well then it's fodder for the message boards tomorrow"

"I, once was retired but he's sort of backHaven't been the same since Uncle L sneezed on a track(Heee-shay!) I'm 'bout to throw some D's on the 'LacSike...my guest appearances is cheese for the ratsPease porridge hot? Nah nigga, pease porridge blackPlease pour a batch of Singaporan tea, more than thatY'all gon' need some bigger cups if you fuckin' with me and NaledgeEven college was a hustle to him, like me at ClaflinWe is laughin' at the competition deviouslySo much accomplished, Wikipedia's peeved"

"But she just stood there, scared that I might snapI looked in her eyes and there were years of disappointment starin' right backAnd I was scared too, scared of what she would sayBut I was embarassed like I, like I sat through three Madea playsBefore she walked away, Misery stoppedAnd she said 'look at your music career, you're in the same spotNah,' I said, 'don't even try meBecause you used to stand beside meBut I moved so far ahead you're ninety feet behind me'"

"[Relationships] never seem to work out, I mean it gets to the point where I have to be extremely cautious. You have to understand, this stardom thing is still new to me, I don't even consider myself "famous". It's 2008: if you have a blog, a mixtape and two pairs of skinny jeans you, too, can be 'famous'."

"I wasn’t reluctant about it. I’ve had so many fans online and at shows ask for my old material that I was surprised. So when I had the chance to release my back catalog on iTunes it was really for the fans. I’m still surprised when a fan comes up to me and ask about F.O.O.D. I want to please those fans that have enjoyed my previous albums and I also want to be able to see the progression of my music for posterity sake."

"I rarely get mentioned in the same category as these other guys who have come out after me...[b]ut maybe I’m not that, maybe I’m not an Internet rapper."

"I have never said that the terrorists' interpretation of Islam is the accurate or correct one. But I have pointed out that the terrorists portray themselves quite successfully among Muslims as the exponents of true and pure Islam, and moderates have mounted no successful response as yet."

"I was surprised to see that there was indeed religiously sanctioned violence in it, as well as some others things which I found disturbing. But it was all intriguing, because I was entranced by the shorter, poetic chapters. I thought it very striking that this beauty could co-exist with clear mandates for warfare and violence against unbelievers."

"They [Americans] have something worth defending...they need to defend it properly from the foe that most people are afraid even to name. How can you possibly fight an enemy when you're afraid to identify him?"

"Inflamed by this mindset, Muslims all around the perimeter of the Islamic world are fighting their neighbors of other religions—Hindus in India, Communist and Buddhist Chinese, Jews, Christians in a score of countries, and pagan animists in Africa. In this light, it is wishful thinking to bracket Islam and peace."

"Of course, when Hindus fought Hindus they observed these restraints because they shared the same values: both sides revered the same temples, monasteries, and, for that matter, cows. But Sita Ram Goel is right that the actions of the Muslims were in accord with Islamic law and precedent; these actions can't be attributed solely to attempts to end resistance and demoralize the locals. The Muslim invaders' behavior was consistent with the example of the Prophet who once enjoined one of his followers "to attack Ubna in the morning and burn the place.""

"Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other. Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning."

"Europe could be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century. … Will tourists in Paris in the year 2015 take a moment to visit the "mosque of Notre Dame" and the "Eiffel Minaret?" Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have failed to do at the time of the Crusaders: conquer Europe. If demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by middle of this century. … What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. In her book Eurabia, Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing." … France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League."

"With statements like these from the Qur’an and Muhammad, it is no wonder that women in the Islamic world suffer such inequalities."

"While human nature is everywhere the same and Muslims can, of course, act as tolerantly as anyone else, the example of Muhammad, the highest model for human behavior, constantly pulls them in a different direction."

"Muslim feminists and their allies assert that any oppression of women in Muslim countries occurs in spite of Islam, not because of it, and that the genuine Islamic attitude toward women is one of unstinting respect."

"Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i.e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing.""

"I have long contended that Islam is unique among the major world religions in having a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system mandating warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. There is no orthodox sect or school of Islam that teaches that Muslims must coexist peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis. I use the term “radical Islam” merely to distinguish those Muslims who are actively working to advance this subjugation from the many millions who are not, as well as to emphasize that the stealth jihad program is truly radical: it aims at nothing less than the transformation of American society and the imposition of Islamic law here, subjugating women and non-Muslims to the status of legal inferiors."

"Whatever the wisdom of the Calcutta petition, it was a sincere attempt to address a problem that has existed since the first days of Muhammad’s prophecy, and that will undoubtedly continue to exist as long as there are people who believe the Koran contains the unadulterated words of the one, true God: Muslims will commit violence against non-Muslims, believing that they have been ordered to do so by Allah in the Koran."

"Islamic apologists in the West argue furiously that child marriage has nothing to do with Islam, and that the idea that Muhammad married a child is the invention of greasy Islamophobes. In reality, few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage."

"We are truly in a battle for our very lives not just in the sense that they will kill us if they can, but in the sense that life itself is being challenged, that it's life versus death, you either love life or you love death, creation versus destruction, love versus hatred, that's what this is about. And so, when we see the Islamic State (ISIS), we see not only that they embody Islam as I have explained here in this, that's all in the Quran what they do, but also that they embody what may be, the foremost evil force that the world has ever seen."

"Most local imams in Dagestan shun radical views, but they have found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State. Some imams who spoke against radical Islam have been killed.” Why have they “found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State”? To Western leaders such as David Cameron, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Pope Francis, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and a host of others, it is patently obvious that the Qur’an teaches peace and that Islam is a religion of peace. So it ought to be child’s play for these imams in Dagestan to refute the twisted, hijacked version of Islam presented by the Islamic State. Here’s an idea: why doesn’t Barack Obama send Kerry to Dagestan to explain to young Muslims how the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misrepresenting Islam? Or maybe Pope Francis could go there, or he could send some Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic bishop — say, one who knows that Islam is at its core a peaceful religion and who moves actively to silence and ostracize those who say otherwise — to the Islamic State, straight to Raqqa, to explain to the caliph how he is misunderstanding Islam. That would clear up this problem in a hurry. I volunteer to pay the bishop’s airfare."

"The myth that poverty causes terrorism. In reality, study after study has shown that jihadists are not poor and bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated than their peers. CNS noted that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”"

"It is no surprise that the is thrilled about Khizr Khan’s “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump,” even though Khan, not quite accurately, claims that Trump wants to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. In any case, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan today overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens."

"It isn’t surprising that Trump would be reading Jihad Watch. ... What makes this striking is that Trump made no secret of reading this site, unlike numerous others who are so afraid of the politically correct thought police that they read it in secret — even back when I was giving seminars for the U.S. military on the terrorist mindset, one colonel urged me not to say that I had been there, so afraid was he of Hamas-linked CAIR. It’s long past time to stop that kind of kowtowing. Those of us who are defending human rights against jihad terror and Sharia oppression have nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of, and must not accept the enemy characterization of us, as that characterization itself is just a weapon in their arsenal and an attempt to clear away opposition to jihad and Sharia. It’s good news that the corrupt media is being passed over in favor of the truth tellers. Kudos to Trump for not bowing to the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion."

"[Sweden and Britain are] two weak and spineless dhimmi states"

"The name Muhammad actually appears in the Qur'an only four times, and in three of those instances it could be used as a title – the "praised one" or "chosen one" – rather than as a proper name."

"In short, the lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that material developed, and much more suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him."

"But at first, the Arab empire did not have a compelling political theology to compete with those it supplanted and solidify its conquests. The earliest Arab rulers appear to have been adherents of a monotheistic religion centered around Abraham and Ishmael, which Crone and Cook dubbed “Hagarism.” They frowned upon the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ—hence Muawiya’s letter to the Byzantine emperor Constantine, calling on him to “renounce this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham.”"

"Whatever the case, the records make clear that toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, the Umayyads began to speak much more specifically about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book."

"The nearly total silence manifests itself in the curiously euphemistic manner in which human rights groups report on the plight of Christians, when they notice that plight at all. For example, Amnesty International’s 2007 report on the human rights situation in Egypt dismisses the suffering of Coptic Christians in a single sentence so filled with euphemism and moral equivalence and so lacking in context that it almost erases the crime it describes... The passive voice seems to be the rule of the day where jihad violence against Christians is concerned. The 2007 Amnesty International report on Indonesia includes this line: “Minority religious groups and church buildings continued to be attacked.” By whom? AI is silent. “In Sulawesi, sporadic religious violence occurred throughout the year.”41 Who is responsible for that violence? AI doesn’t say. Amnesty International seems more concerned about protecting Islam and Islamic groups from being implicated in human rights abuses than about protecting Christians from those abuses."

"It would be patently obvious to everyone that the Islamic State is Islamic—were it not for the fact that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, David Cameron, and virtually every other authority in the Western world insist that it’s not."

"As they did in other lands they conquered, the Arabs made a clean sweep of the Persian Empire. Islam holds the achievements of all civilizations before their conquest by Muslims to be worthless trash, jahiliyya, products of the society of unbelievers. And so in the fourteenth century the pioneering Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had to ask, “Where are the sciences of the Persians that Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest?” The answer was that they had been obliterated at the hands of those who believed, as in a quip attributed to the Caliph Umar, that if books agreed with the Qur’an, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it, they were heretical—in either case, of no account."

"There has been remarkably little pushback against the Islamic and leftist assault against the freedom of speech. For the most part, those in positions of power and influence seem not to realize the implications of what is happening, or else they don’t care—when they aren’t actively complicit in the steady muzzling of dissent."

"There are, in short, very good reasons to be an Islamophobe, that is, to be concerned about Islam for the devastation that it brings into the lives of human beings both Muslim and non-Muslim. It is not hatred and bigotry to be the right kind of Islamophobe, that is, as opposed to one who attacks innocent Muslims, something that is never justified."

"India, too, felt the force of jihad. Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel notes that by 1206, the Muslim invaders had conquered “the Punjab, Sindh, Delhi, and the Doab up to Kanauj.” The jihad also continued elsewhere. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet besieged Constantinople in 1453, he offered the Byzantines a triple choice: “surrender of the city, death by the sword, or conversion to Islam.” This was based upon the tradition in which Muhammad told the Muslims to offer unbelievers conversion to Islam or submission to Islamic hegemony, or war if they refused both."

"Propaganda may be effective in the short term, but reality cannot be hidden forever. (Chapter 1)"

"This book represents the crown and summit of everything I have to say that anyone who doesn’t know me personally may care to listen to. I’ve written a guide to the Qur’an and a biography of Muhammad, and with this book, the case is complete—that is, the case that there are elements within Islam that pose a challenge to free societies, and that free people need to pay attention to this fact before it is, quite literally, too late. It is necessary for me to repeat yet again that this does not mean that every individual Muslim, or any given Muslim, embodies that challenge and is posing it individually, but as this book makes clear, the Islamic jihad imperative remains regardless of whether or not any Muslim individual decides to take it up."

"The government of Myanmar denied committing any atrocities against the Rohingyas, asserting that many widely reported incidents had been fabricated, but the media generally brushed aside these denials. Few news outlets reported that the conflict had intensified in the summer and fall of 2017 because of an August 2017 jihad attack on Myanmar police and border posts. And hardly any news reports informed the public about the roots of the conflict: the Rohingya Muslims had actually been waging jihad against the Buddhists of Myanmar for nearly two centuries... In 1942, the British armed the Rohingyas to fight the Japanese, but the Rohingyas instead turned their weapons on the Buddhists, destroying whole villages, as well as Buddhist monasteries. When the British withdrew that same year in the face of the Japanese advance, the Rohingyas set upon the Buddhists of Arakan in force, killing at least 20,000... But for the media, the crisis in Myanmar was simply a matter of “anti-Muslim bigotry”..."

"In July 751, at the Talas River on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the forces of the new caliphate met those of the Chinese Tang dynasty, in what was to be the decisive battle for hegemony over Central Asia. China’s Westward expansion was stopped, and the region was definitively secured for Islam. The Buddhist and Christian presence in Central Asia went into rapid decline. The area would be Islamic ever after."

"There were, according to Muslim warrior Abu Sa’id al-Khadri, “some excellent Arab women” among the captives of the Banu al-Mustaliq. “We desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, [but at the same time] we also desired ransom for them.” The Qur’an permitted them to have sexual intercourse with slave girls captured in battle—“those captives whom your right hands possess” (4:24)—but if they intended to keep the women as slaves, they couldn’t collect ransom money for them. “So,” Abu Sa’id explained, “we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing azl”—that is, coitus interruptus. Muhammad, however, told them this was not necessary: “It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.” Conceptions and births were up to Allah alone. The enslavement and rape of the women were taken for granted."

"By now the attentive reader will have noticed a curious absence from the drama surrounding Jewish settlement in Palestine, the rise of Zionism, and the establishment of the Jewish state: through it all, the “Palestinians,” named as such, are nowhere to be seen. It is no accident that neither Mark Twain, nor any of the series of English travelers who visited the area, nor anyone else who traveled through desolate Palestine over the centuries ever mentioned the “Palestinian” people. They spoke of encountering Muslim Arabs, as well as Jews, Christian Arabs, and others, but no one, among multitudes of people who wrote about Palestine, ever refers to any Palestinians. Nor do the many British white papers and other documents the British government produced during the Mandate period ever mention the Palestinians. The opposing factions in those documents are the Jews and the Arabs. There is a very simple reason for this: there were no Palestinians."

"Facts? Jimmy Wales, your Wikipedia bio of me is a propaganda piece full of half-truths, distortions, & outright lies, & has been for years. Wikipedia does this to everyone who dares dissent from the far-Left agenda. Everyone knows this. You’re not fooling anyone."

"People don't do this because the pressures are too great for the most part, not only death threats, but all the defamation, all the negativity, like the wikipedia bio, everything, if you search me on the internet you'll find 99 percent of it is negative, this is what happens.. to anybody who speaks the truth about these issues.. India, along with Israel and Spain, are really the only places where the jihad has ever suffered losses and been ruled back from territory control."

"Hindutva isn't an American problem, @AudreyTruschke It never was and never will be. Hindutva means "Hinduness" or the qualities of being a Hindu; it's simply Hinduism. What you call Hindutva are Hindus who oppose the Hinduphobia that your Leftist/Islamic hate alliance produces."

"Offered with love to all the people of the world who love the Qur’an"

"Around 1655, the Persian-language book Dabestan-e Mazaheb (School of Religions) was published in India, containing the texts of two chapters of the Qur’an, Sura al-Walaya (“The Guardian”) and Sura al-Nurayn (“The Two Lights”). These two chapters are clearly meant to bolster the Shi‘ite case. The guardian is Ali, and the two lights are obviously Muhammad and Ali. However, these two suras are almost certainly forgeries, and not only Sunnis, but Shi‘ites also consider them inauthentic."

"However, there are so many grammatical errors and repetitions in the Qur’an as it stands that these cannot make the case for the inauthenticity of these two suras. The strongest case against them is based upon their relatively late appearance and clear apologetic intent, along with the fact that even though these passages are meant to establish the Shi‘ite case, the Shi‘ites reject them. Nevertheless, their very existence is noteworthy, as Islam’s theology of the perfection and unchangeable character of the Qur’an did not deter their author from making edits in the holy text; they could be the product of a time when the Qur’anic text was still undergoing revision, and one was not risking one’s life by making changes. If they originated later, that their author would have dared produce them is all the more striking in light of what were then and still are the prevailing beliefs and assumptions about the immutability of the Qur’anic text. In any case, even if they originated close to the time of the publication of Dabestan-e Mazaheb , and the Arabic version is no older than the Persian, they attest to the fact that in some quarters, changes were indeed made in the Qur’anic text, and that text has never been static."

"The Roman Empire of Constantinople deserves not dismissal but patient study, gratitude, and respect. We are still living in its long shadow. In the best aspects of our society, we are still living in it."

"“Islamophobia” is a propaganda term that is used for two unrelated phenomena: vigilante attacks against innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology behind jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. The goal of this conflation is to inhibit such analysis and intimidate people into thinking it’s wrong to oppose jihad terror. And it’s working great."

"Child marriage is sanctioned in Islam.Islamic tradition records that Muhammad consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, and the resultant fact that child marriage is accepted in wide swaths of the Islamic world. Child marriage has abundant attestation in Islamic tradition and law."

"If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the crusader-in-chief George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam. And we send a special invitation to all of you fighting Bush’s crusader pipe dream in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else W. has sent you to die."

"Spencer’s readers are carefully steered away from all contact with the Islamic interpretative tradition, which equals or exceeds that of any other religion, because any scholarly knowledge about Islam would expose all his extremist interpretations to ridicule."

"The farsighted Willard G. Wyman, the commanding general of the Continental Army Command, had asked Stoner to design a rifle precisely to take advantage of the “payoff” of smaller bullets. The AR-15, the precursor of the M-16, used .22-caliber bullets instead of the .30-caliber that had long been standard for the Army. As early as 1928, an Army “Caliber Board” had conducted firing experiments in Aberdeen, Maryland, and had then recommended a move toward smaller ammunition..."

"In the long run, a society's strength depends on the way that ordinary people voluntarily behave. Ordinary people matter because there are so many of them. Voluntary behavior matters because it is hard to supervise everyone all the time. … Successful societies — those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world — succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good. The behavior that helps each person will, as a cumulative ethos, help the society as a whole."

"Japan gets the most of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed. America, by getting out of their way so that they can adjust individually, allows them to succeed. It is not that Japan has no individualists and America no organizations, but the thrusts of the societies are different. Japan has distorted its economy and depressed its living standard in order to keep its job structure and social values as steady as possible. At the government's direction, the entire economy has tried to flex almost as one, in response to the ever-changing world. The country often seems like a family that becomes more tightly bound together when it must withstand war, emigration, or some other upheaval. America's strength is the opposite: it opens its doors and brings the world's disorder in. It tolerates social change that would tear most other countries apart. The openness encourages Americans to adapt as individuals rather than as a group."

"Americans who know nothing else about firearms are all too familiar with the name AR-15. It’s the semi-automatic weapon that murderers have used in many of the most notorious and highest-casualty gun killings of recent years: Aurora, Colorado. Newtown, Connecticut. Orlando, Florida. San Bernardino, California. Now, with modified versions, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Sutherland Springs, Texas."

"A little bullet pays off so much in wound ballistics. That is what people who choose these weapons know."

"Back in the 1980s, I wrote a long detailed article about the design concepts that the AR-15's creator, Eugene Stoner, put into this weapon, and the ways it changed before going into service as the military’s M-16."

"I consider myself a pretty rounded guy. I've done pretty elite things in business, sport and academics and all of a sudden I woke up one morning and I'm a 'big, black, British, gay guy'. That was frustrating at times"

"You are axes, in a world of wood. And the wood remembers when it has been cut, even if the axe forgets."

"I look at Hank and he nods and I nod and for a brief second I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going."

"More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to be close to someone. More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to feel as if I wasn't alone."

"I don't believe she's in Heaven and I don't believe she's in a better place. She's dead and when we're dead, we're gone. There are no blinding lights, there is no happy music, there are no angels waiting to greet us. St. Peter is not at the Pearly Gates with a big fat fucking book, our friends and Relatives are not holding a seat for us at a divine dinner table, we do not get a tour of Heaven. We're dead and that is it. No more."

"I don't want to be alone. I have never wanted to be alone. I fucking hate it. I hate that I have no one to talk to, I hate that I have no one to call, I hate that I have no one to hold my hand, hug me, tell me everything is going to be all right....I hate that I have no one to share my hopes and my dreams with, I hate that I have no longer have any hopes or dreams, I hate that I have no one to tell me to hold on, that I can find them again. I hate that when I scream, and I scream bloody murder, that I am screaming into emptiness. I hate that there is no one to hear my scream and that there is no one to help me learn how to stop screaming."

"Where the fuck did they make you, Kid? What's that mean? Where does someone like you come from? I've lived a lot of places. Like where? Why do you care? Just wondering. Stop wondering. Why? I don't want to make friends here. Why? I don't like good-byes. You gotta say them though. No, you don't."

"Life is hard, Kid, you gotta be harder. You gotta take it on and fight for it and be a fucking man about how you live it. If you're too much of a pussy to do that, then maybe you should leave, 'cause you're dead already."

"What I know is that I can trust his eyes because what lives in them, lives in me."

"He starts to break and seeing him start to break makes me start to break and I don't want that. He steps forward and puts his arms around me and he hugs me and I hug him and it feels good and strong and pure and real. This is my Brother, my Blood, the only thing in this World created from which I am created from, the Person in this World who knows me best, the Person who would miss me most if I was gone. That he cared enough to come here and that he cares enough to nearly break in front of me means something, but in the end, I know that it means only so much."

"...he lost the most important thing a human being can lose, which was his dignity. I know a bit about the loss of dignity. I know that when you take away a man's dignity there is a hole, a deep black hole filled with despair, humiliation and self-hatred, filled with emptiness, shame and disgrace, filled with loss and isolation and Hell. It's a deep, dark, horrible fucking hole, and that hole is where people like me live our sad-ass, fucked-up, dignity-free, inhuman lives, and where we die, alone, miserable, wasted and forgotten."

"As I said before Kid, you walk out of here, and I'm having you brought back. As many times as it takes, I will have you brought the fuck back. You can go ahead and test me on that if you want, but I suggest you no. The smart thing would be to take my advice. I may be a coke Addict and a fellow Patient and a Fuck-Up of the First Order, but I am giving you good advice. Be smart, be strong, be proud, live honorably and with dignity and just hold on."

"In the face of surviving long enough to survive in the long term, there is no goal that comes to mind that means anything to me. I could write Survive, but I would rather hold that word in my heart than write it on some fucking board."

"I don't want safety or support. I want there to be me and whatever I have to face, be it alcohol or drugs or something else. I want there to be a fight because I know how to fight. There will be a winner of that fight. If it's me, I walk away and I have beat the shit that I didn't think I could ever beat and I move on with my life. If it's not me, at least I get it over with."

"I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself."

"I don't blame you for this and I don't think there's anything you could have done to stop it. I am what I am, which is an Alcoholic and a Drug Addict and a Criminal, and I am whats I am because I made myself so. You did the best you could with me, and you loved me the best you could, and that's all I could have ever asked for from you. I have no excuses for what I've done or for who I am or for what I put you though all these years."

"Take the risk and do whatever you can do and try not to get caught. If you do get caught, do it again."

"The Addicts and Alcoholics give straight, simple answers. We ask no questions. Unlike the Family Members, we already know the answers. We fuck up your lives. We ruin every single one of your days. We are your worst nightmare. You don't know what to do with us. You're at the end of your rope. You don't know what to do. You're at the end of your fucking rope. You don't know what to do."

"Addiction is a decision. An individual wants something, whatever that something is, and makes a decision to get it. Once they have it, they make a decision to take it. If they take it too often, that process of decision making gets out of control, and if it gets far out of control, it becomes an addiction. At that point the decision is a difficult one to make, but it is still a decision. Do I or don't I. Am I going to take or am I not going to waste my life or am I going to say no and try and stay sober and be a decent Person. It is a decision. Each and every time. A decision. String enough of those decisions together and you set a course and you set a standard of living. Addict or human. Genetics do not make that call. They are just an excuse. They allow people to say it wasn't my fault I am genetically predisposed. It wasn't my fault I was programmed from day one. It wasn't my fault I didn't have any say in the matter. Bullshit. Fuck that bullshit. There is always a decision. Take responsibility for it. Addict or human. It's a fucking decision. Each and every time."

"I think it's bullshit. People don't want to accept the responsibility for their own weakness so they place the blame on something that they're not responsible for, like a disease or genetics. As far as studies go, I could prove I was from Mars if you gave me enough time and enough resources."

"Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work."

"All of us started out normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives we got lost. Though we are here at this Clinic trying to find our way back, we all know that most of us will never get there. Things like the fight allow us to dream, and take us away from here, and allow us to imagine what the normal World must be like and how normal people must live in it."

"I don't know if I lost the courage to kill myself, or gained the strength not to, but I didn't do it. I kept living and drinking and doing drugs and fucking up. Eventually I ended up here."

"I was weak and pathetic and I couldn't control myself. An explanation, especially a bullshit one, doesn't alter the circumstances. I need to change, I have to change, and at this point, change is my only option, unless I am ready to die. All that matters is that I make myself something else and someone else for the future."

"If you think you're making that choice, you're wrong. Your choices are made by the shit that controls you and the shit you can't quit. You walk out of here and that is going to kill you and that's fucking wrong. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe not my ass. How about walking back in and being a fucking man? How about walking back in and putting up a fucking fight? How about walking back in and doing what's decent and right and honorable and showing a little pride, just a little bit of fucking pride?"

"[Leonard] gave me the best advice that I was given while I was at the center, which was to hold on. No matter how bad or difficult life becomes, if you hold on, hold on to whatever it is you need to hold on to, be it religion, friends, a support group, a set of steps or your own heart, if you hold on, just hold on, life will get better."

"This does not mean that scientists can't be religious. We can encompass irrational beliefs without regret and without obligation—I can, actually, look at my kids in a different way than I would an experimental subject under my microscope. I also do not pretend that I view my children rationally and objectively, untainted by emotion or history, and I'm not ashamed of that at all. So, a scientist should have no problem demanding one standard of logic and evidence in the lab, and dropping that demand when they go to church on Sunday."

"If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs — rethinking the world isn't an option."

"...what I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works."

"Look at the bible as a pastiche, a collection of mutually and often internally inconsistent fragments slapped together for crude reasons of politics and art and priestly self-promotion and sometimes beauty and a lot of chest-thumping tribalism, and through that lens, it makes a lot of sense. It does tell us something important…about us, not some fantastic mythological being. It tells us that we are fractious, arrogant, scrappy people who sometimes accomplish great things and more often cause grief and pain to one another. We want to be special in a universe that is uncaring and cold, and in which the nature of our existence is a transient flicker, so we invent these strange stories of grand beginnings, like every orphan dreaming that they are the children of kings who will one day ride up on a white horse and take them away to a beautiful palace and a rich and healthy family that will love them forever. We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned."

"People who say this cracker is literally and physically the body of their god and that I'm doing this great act of heresy and sacrilege and horror -- even though I didn't actually do anything to it -- is disturbing. It's like discovering there are witch doctors lurking in your community and they've been doing weird practices."

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

"I have been told that my position won't win the creationist court cases. Do you think I care? I didn't become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars"."

"Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests — put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again."

"If a scientist saw a cataclysm coming, say a meteor on collision course for earth in 2050, we wouldn’t be saying, “Hallelujah, physics is true, bring it on! Our faith in mathematics is strengthened!” We’d be trying to stop it. Which makes the Christian reaction puzzling. If I actually believed Jesus was coming to end the world, I’d be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails. They were pretty effective last time."

"What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail."

"We're confronted all the time with evolving viruses and bacteria. The Red Queen really rules the biological world, and we have to keep running just to keep up pace with the changing microorganisms. Yet policymakers and the public deny vaccination, and evolution itself, and question the value of biomedical research. Maybe they don't believe in evolution, but the microorganisms trying to kill us are taking full advantage of it."

"Faith is a vice pretending to be a virtue, its lies and errors and frothy nonsense deluding us and distracting us from action. There's no salvation in wishful thinking, only inertia. Faith is the enemy of reason. The one thing every single one of us here must be united in despising is faith. It's the barren refuge of the vacuous, the fearful, the frauds, and the obstacles to accomplishment."

"Human beings are still fish."

"Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month. In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles."

"I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong."

"If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that specialized subject. Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi."

"A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated."

"Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)."

"Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia."

"Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years. Uh, ;-)"

"I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Wikipedia, you're still at it."

"I have learned that the people probably angriest at Wikipedia are Hindus... I am happy to point out the obvious, namely, that Wikipedia is biased... What you *would* accomplish, however, is to persuasively expose the anti-Hindu bias on Wikipedia."

"Compare how Britannica and Wikipedia introduce the traditional system of Indian medicine called Ayerveda. Britannica is respectful. Wikipedia has no fewer than four dismissive epithets in the first paragraph: "quackery," "pseudoscientific," "protoscience," and "unscientific."... Not long ago, this article would have been regarded as a deep offense against multiculturalism. ... It is not the role of an encyclopedia to tell people what to think or to cast aspersions on entire cultures. ... Wikipedia should make *no* claims on its own behalf about what is (effective) medicine; that is not the role of an encyclopedia. It can repeat research on that though. ... You assume that you can detect what "modern medicine," or other scientific or scholarly work, really is, i.e., whether it actually passes muster of the scientific method. ... If the systems of peer review is screwed up, you can't. Nor if medical research is tainted by filthy lucre from Big Pharma. The world is considerably more complicated than the silly children at Wikipedia think it is. Britannica at least understands that much."

"There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length. Man makes plans, and God laughs."

"It's harder to find a page where there *isn't* some glaringly obvious bias."

"Jimmy Wales is right. We did originally adopt the neutrality policy to foster "a culture of thoughtful diplomatic honesty." In other words, the way to keep the peace among a radically diverse set of contributors is not to declare winners and losers. But that is only one reason we adopted the policy. There was another key reason: as I have explained, no one has a right to make up your mind for you, especially in an open, global project."

"A lot of mainstream news stories are broken only in Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—all of which are banned from use as sources by Wikipedia. Beyond that, many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly "radical"; they are still mainstream."

"It's become both opaque and centralized, centralized in the sense that the authority to participate in Wikipedia has been greatly restricted. You can be completely anonymous and even be a top-ranked Wikipedia user with administrator rights. So, they could be working for various corporations, various government spy agencies, maybe for criminal organizations."

"It's mob rule and it has been basically since I left."

"I wish they spend it in more sensible ways like they could be adding ... a feedback system for the public that does not require the public to actually interact with these insane wikipedians, that would be a start."

"Basically, the Left tends to invade open institutions, it's been their modus-operandi for the last hundred years. Basically, invading open institutions and subverting them, dominating them, and freezing out anyone who dissents their views. I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious 10 years ago, now it's just embarrassing... Now there is an official view about pretty much everything..."

"I actually think that the mechanisms just of people acting like jerks and driving off decent people who want a neutral reference, that's enough to explain the bias"

"There is no rule of law in wikipedia... but the way that the policies are applied is absolutely arbitrary."

"They have no class."

"They seem not to realize that it is possible to dispute what the facts are, as if they were in all cases absolutely obvious."

"False balance... according to which on some topics the facts are known and if you actually try to let people make up their own minds by themselves by presenting one side and then another side in a balanced fashion then you are committing the sin of false balance, and wikipedia has absolutely abandoned the neutrality policy by endorsing that journalistic canard."

"One thing that i would recommend, go to Everipedia, edit the article about the Delhi riots: that would be really interesting if you do that, once it is developed give me a link to it and I would be curious to see how the article differs from the Wikipedia article."

"The best thing we can do basically is to supply alternatives and make them better and better and better."

"If you are an admin, or if you just have a lot of pull because you are popular because you have a lot of views and stroke the right backs, if you are in the in-crowd then you have a lot more authority in the system. It is mob rule and it has been since I left. Although it was become more organised in many ways. There is a veneer of rather strict bureaucracy – a set of rules and functions applied in an arbitrary way. You can detect a pattern, but it’s a political pattern. Not a principled pattern."

"The bias that they (Wikipedia) now reflect, is that of the Globalist Left. Of the Establishment, with a capital E."

"It is more than just a mob now. It is a mob in the sense that there is real internal political authority being wielded and no regularised fair, democratic way of determining who should have that authority. The arbitration committee elections are a joke. You cannot know, announce, reveal the identities of the most of administrators on Wikipedia... you don't know who those people are and if you don't know, there is no accountability. It is a self-contained system. If it just so happened that one of the leading administrators on Wikipedia is a convicted paedophile, sitting in prison right now, in some prison where they let prisoners use the internet, that does not make any difference because there is no way of finding that out. That bothers me. That does not make it a mob. What makes it a mob is the combination of lack of a fair democratic process of determining who those in charge would be and lack of a fair application of rules, there is no rule of law in Wikipedia. They try to make it look like there is since they keep citing these alphabets soup of acronyms which is short for policies, but the way in which these policies are applied is arbitrary."

"[From concluding remarks on results from multiple search engines.] Look at it this way. Among the responses to searches on politically charged topics such as "Ukraine" and "gay marriage," there are boatloads of relevant pages, from a wide variety of sources, that I would want placed higher than just these. Why on earth should we constantly see Wikipedia, New York Times, Britannica, Vox, Pew, ABC News, CNN, etc., come up over and over and over again? I don't mean I want to see more of Fox, WSJ, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail. I mean, that wouldn't hurt, but that's not my point. I would like to see high-quality material (there is a lot) from the long tail of downranked websites. I saw the Epoch Times once, and the Federalist, Breitbart, and National Review never. There were very few relatively obscure websites."

"Wikipedia is so ironic. We wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but what emerged was one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history."

"I like and admire Larry very much. I actually think his role in the early days of Wikipedia is under-appreciated."

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

"There is an unquestionable relationship between economic development and liberal democracy, which one can observe simply by looking around the world. But the exact nature of that relationship is more complicated than it first appeared, and is not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this point. The logic of modern natural science and the industrialization process it fosters does not point in a single direction in the sphere of politics, as it does in the sphere of economics. Liberal democracy is compatible with industrial maturity, and is preferred by the citizens of many industrially advanced states, but there does not appear to be a necessary connection between the two. The Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one. We will therefore have to look elsewhere in trying to understand the current crisis of authoritarianism and the worldwide democratic revolution."

"The form that a future left-wing challenge to our present liberalism may take could be considerably different from those with which we are familiar in this century. The threat to liberty posed by communism was so direct and obvious, and the doctrine so discredited at present, that it is hard to see it as anything but totally exhausted throughout the developed world. A future left-wing threat to liberal democracy is much more likely to wear the clothing of liberalism while changing its meaning from within, rather than to stage a frontal attack on basic democratic institutions and principles. For example, almost all liberal democracies have seen a massive proliferation of new “rights” over the past generation. Not content merely to protect life, liberty, and property, many democracies have also defined rights to privacy, travel, employment, recreation, sexual preference, abortion, childhood, and so on. Needless to say, many of these rights are ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory. It is easy to foresee situations in which the basic rights defined by, say, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were seriously abridged by newly minted rights whose aim was a more thoroughgoing equalization of society."

"While we do not, for now, have to share Nietzsche’s hatred of liberal democracy, we can make use of his insights concerning the uneasy relationship between democracy and the desire for recognition. That is, to the extent that liberal democracy is successful at purging megalothymia from life and substituting for it rational consumption, we will become last men. But human beings will rebel at this thought. That is, they will rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated members of a universal and homogeneous state, each the same as the other no matter where on the globe one goes. They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery—the life of rational consumption—in the end, boring. They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war. This is the “contradiction” that liberal democracy has not yet solved."

"It is in the very design of democratic capitalist countries like the United States that the most talented and ambitious natures should tend to go into business, rather than into politics, the military, universities, or the church. And it would seem not entirely a bad thing for the long-run stability of democratic politics that economic activity can preoccupy such ambitious natures for an entire lifetime. This is not simply because such people create wealth which migrates through the economy as a whole, but because such people are kept out of politics and the military. In those latter occupations, their restlessness would lead them to propose innovations at home or adventures abroad, with potentially disastrous consequences for the polity."

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."

"No regime—no “socio-economic system”—is able to satisfy all men in all places. This includes liberal democracy. This is not a matter of the incompleteness of the democratic revolution, that is, because the blessings of liberty and equality have not been extended to all people. Rather, the dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely: it is a dissatisfaction with liberty and equality."

"Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. …"[W]ar" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world."

"The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military."

"Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up."

"The Left’s identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions."

"The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close. The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships."

"The more progress that has been made toward eradicating social injustices, the more intolerable the remaining injustices seem, and thus the moral imperative to mobilizing to correct them."

"Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin."

"Putin told the Financial Times that liberalism has become an “obsolete” doctrine. While it may be under attack from many quarters today, it is in fact more necessary than ever. It is more necessary because it is fundamentally a means of governing over diversity, and the world is more diverse than it ever has been. Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities."

"In situations of de facto diversity, attempts to impose a single way of life on an entire population is a formula for dictatorship."

"[P]rogressives on the left have shown themselves willing to abandon liberal values in pursuit of social justice objectives. There has been a sustained intellectual attack on liberal principles over the past three decades coming out of academic pursuits like gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, that deny the universalistic premises underlying modern liberalism. The challenge is not simply one of intolerance of other views or “cancel culture” in the academy or the arts. Rather, the challenge is to basic principles that all human beings were born equal in a fundamental sense, or that a liberal society should strive to be color-blind."

"[I]t is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of resolving differences."

"I have been a... classical liberal for most of my life..."

"I do want to defend liberalism... in theory and I want to talk about the ways that it is being threatened... today and... some of the consequences..."

"[T]here are two justifications for [liberalism]. One... is pragmatic and the other... is moral."

"The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is... a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf... as a result of the European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation."

"In the ... a third of the population of central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects, and the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends [defined by religions] out of political discussion... and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself, and not "the good life"... as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion."

"[T]herefore tolerance of diversity, of people that don't believe the same thing that you do, has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another."

"In the 19th and early 20th century the issue had shifted from religion to nation. You had mixed ethnic populations throughout Europe, and as Europe began to reorganize itself on a national, or a cultural, or an ethnic basis, you had two bloody... World Wars that... undermined the magnificent European civilization of the 19th century... Liberalism was called upon in the aftermath... to enable Europeans to live together in ethnically diverse societies. That was the origin of the European Union... an effort to move beyond Nationalism, to a new form of ."

"[T]hat liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society..."

"[A]fter World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. ...[T]here was a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage, because liberalism was a universal doctrine. ...[T]hat's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one."

"[L]iberalism is... a protection of human autonomy."

"The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity... the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th-18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is... based on human autonomy."

"In Kant's words, human beings are uncaused causes, and therefore have infinite value, and a liberal regime protects that autonomy by giving people rights... [T]he right to speak, to organize, to associate, and ultimately to have a share of power by being able to vote. ...[T]his is ...the moral status, the dignity that life in a liberal regime that does respect individual rights, gives us, and it is one of the reasons that to this day, people do not want to live in authoritarian countries that do not recognize the fundamental dignity of their... citizens."

"[F]or both the pragmatic... and... moral reasons... liberalism became the dominant doctrine of the 20th century, and should... continue to be defended...."

"[T]here are defects and gaps in a liberal society that are constantly being filled by other longings and... structures... that sometimes end up undermining that liberal project."

"[O]ne of the problems... both on the left and the right is that the... individual autonomy protected by liberalism tends to take more and more extreme versions... and... becomes self-undermining."

"[O]n the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth."

"[I]n the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... [W]ithout adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...[T]his ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries."

"The second failing of liberalism comes directly out of the fact that it attempts to lower the horizons of politics. Liberal societies do not want to tell you how to live. They do not want to define "the good life" because that is the source of conflict, but as a result liberal societies tend not to satisfy these very deep human cravings for community, because... there's something wrong with the basic liberal premise that we all start... as ed individuals. We're not self-interested individuals."

"Fundamentally we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. ...[W]e seek community in different ways. There's a right wing... and... a left wing version of this."

"The right wing version really sees community represented either by... religion, or by nation, that these are units that... get dissolved under a liberal world order, through globalization, through the movement of people, goods, ideas and trade between nations, national identity becomes diluted and that sense of national community that held people together in democratic societies appears to be lost. ...[S]ecularism ...is perceived as a loss by people that have religious faith. They believe that there is a form of militant secularism that is not allowing them to practice their religion, and for that reason a lot of religious conservatives in places like the United States, have turned against that liberal order."

"[B]oth of these forces are driving illiberal political movements in many parts of the world... India was a liberal society created by Nehru and Gandhi but under the BJP and Prime Minister Modi it's shifted its national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. In Hungary, with the rise of Viktor Orbán and the party Hugarian national identity has been redefined. Orbán has said Hugarian national identity is based on Hugarian ethnicity, which... is one of the reasons that World War II happened, because the Germans wanted to define German identity on the basis of German ethnicity, and there were many Germans living in... surrounding... central Europe... and that was... the trigger that led to the outbreak of the Second World War."

"[T]his has been going on in other countries... including in the United States, where there has been a deepening polarization between a red... and a blue America that is defined partly by... these feelings of loss of community with regard to both religion and nation."

"There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups."

"[T]he liberal world order that emerged, that... has these pragmatic and... moral dimensions has been severely challenged in the last few years, and the sources of this challenge are numerous. One is the rise of overtly authoritarian states like China and Russia. They have consolidated their rule. They seem to be stable internally, and they are increasingly seeking to project their power and influence, their model... across international borders."

"But there has also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were... the leaders of the neoliberal revolution... in the 1980s..."

"[F]inally, and... somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that... has now been energized and is increasingly vocal... in certain quarters of the cultural community, in the arts and the universities, in Hollywood, in the media... where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal... politics."

"[T]he election... on November 3 [2020]... illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. ...[T]hat election was the most important political fight ...in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States but... for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order."

"The United States has been in a long term decline, with its political institutions decaying. ...[T]he single source of that decline is ...the pervasive polarization ...within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example... has been the COVID pandemic... [W]earing a mask, instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones, becomes as political statement... [Y]ou don't wear a mask if you're a Trump supporter, and you do... if you're a Democrat. This is... not the way that... coherent nations... meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic."

"The polarization has a number of different roots. The economic... fact that many working class voters have been left behind by the prosperity of globalization. ...[T]he more important division is a cultural one ...the feeling on the part of many populist voters, that they are not being respected by the elites that are running the country... [H]ere, all of the identity issues... play themselves out."

"Identity politics in the United States started on the left, after the Civil Rights era, with specific groups like African Americans, women, s and lesbians, indigenous peoples, the disabled. Every one of these groups felt marginalized and disrespected by the dominant white male society that existed... in the early 1960s... [E]ach one of these groups began to demand recognition, not as part of a generic working class, but rather for their particular form of disrespect. ...[T]here's ...a lot to this belief that injustice takes these very specific forms tied to narrow identities. The problem with this is... it began to alienate the traditional working class, which had been the base of the Democratic party, as of every other left wing party in the 20th century... [I]ncreasingly working class whites began to abandon that party because they felt the Democrats were no longer catering to their interests. They're the ones that had lost their jobs to overseas competition. They're the ones who were falling behind in terms of status... income... social respect... [T]hat generated a huge amount of resentment against the elites living in big cities, that had jobs that were secure, that were comfortable in a multicultural, very diverse environment."

"If you look at the sociology of populism in the United States, it is tied most closely to population density, which... is correlated... to these types of cultural differences... to belief... in traditional cultural values, in family, in religion and the like, and conversely to... belief in immigration [and] diversity as strengths... [T]his is the fundamental division that's taken hold of the United States. It has been augmented by technology because the internet has succeeded in... destroying every other source of authority that used to filter news and facts and information that... formed the basis of a democratic ability to have political discourse."

"So today... red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. ...[P]olls ...suggest that a substantial... majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats... stole the election, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president... [W]hen you don't have a common factual basis, you... reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people have started to move into."

"[W]hile Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. ...[T]he Democrats need to look very very carefully at those election results because ...the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent... [U]nless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections."

"Because the President has undisputed authority over foreign policy, President Biden... will be able to reinsert the United States into the international system. He will rejoin the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, he will go to NATO and reaffirm support for... our Asian allies, for Australia, for every other country that has depended on... American power, but... it's going to be extremely difficult to return to the kind of world that we assumed existed before 2016, because America does remain fundamentally divided. That bipartisan support for the liberal international order that we thought was extremely strong is no longer..."

"[A]ny American ally will welcome Biden as president, will be happy that he was elected, but will be a little... distrustful because the Republicans could make a come-back in 2022. They could win the presidency again in 2024. ...[T]here's is still a good third of the American public that remain very strong Trump voters. They're very angry and... are not going to go away... [T]herefore the ability of the United States to resume its role as the chief defender of the liberal order... is going to be contested, both domestically and... by American friends. If this leads to more self-reliance on their part, that may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is going to mean a very different kind of world order than the one I grew up arguing with about."

"[L]iberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe."

"I have a broad definition... Liberalism is a doctrine that was developed in the middle of the 17th century, at the end of Europe's wars of religion, in which a number of early liberal thinkers... said we need to lower the aspirations of politics, not to seek after "the good life" as defined by a particular religious doctrine, but simply to protect life itself by cultivating a virtue of tolerance, whereby, at that time Protestants and Catholics, but... today maybe and could live together peacefully, allowing each to individually choose... what to believe, what to speak, and the like. It believes that all human beings are endowed with a certain basic level of dignity that is equal among all those human beings, and it is institutionalized through a rule of law, by constitutional provisions that prevent the excessive power of the state to limit individual choice. It's not necessarily associated with a particular economic ideology, except that it does protect private property rights... [S]o you can have an expansive social democratic government, like in Sweden or Denmark, or you can have a more limited one like in the United States... [T]hose are all... liberal societies because of that commitment to rule of law."

"[L]iberalism has been very severely threatened in recent years. It's been threatened from a number of sources. So internationally you have two great powers, Russia and China, that are definitely not liberal polities, that have expansive ambitions... [A]s Vladimir Putin said... in an iterview with the FT in 2019 "Liberalism is an obsolete doctrine." But the threat... also comes from other places. ...[Y]ou have the rise of a populist nationalist right in many countries. This is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. This is Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, ...Marine Le Pen in France. All of them criticizing liberalism precisely for the tolerance that it permits and tries to deal with, in diverse and increasingly ethnically and racially diverse countries."

"It's also been attacked from the left by people... I teach students at Stanford, and many of them think that liberalism is... the doctrine of their parents' or their grandparents' generation, but it's really not relevant to Gen Z younger people who are impatient for social justice and social change that liberalism is not providing."

"[T]hat's... the crisis. The number of liberal democracies measured by... Freedom House in its annual survey of freedom around the world has been in decline for 16 straight years, and the biggest declines recently have been in the two biggest liberal democracies, India and the United States. So... we're dealing with a big global problem."

"So let me start by just going back to basics in explaining why liberalism is a desirable form of government, or set of ideas to live under... [T]here's basically 3 reasons. One is practical, one is moral and one is economic."

"The practical reason has to do with that original purpose of liberalism, which was to lower the temperature of politics by taking final ends off the table, and allowing societies to govern themselves when they face religious or national diversity... [T]hat remains one of its biggest selling points. In India, the republic that was created by Gandhi and Nehru was a liberal republic. They did not define themselves in religious terms. They knew that they had to deal with the incredible diversity, not just religious but in terms of cast, , language, many other dimensions... [A] liberal republic was... the only way of accommodating that diversity. What prime minister Modi is seeking to do... is to shift that national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism, which then excludes the up to 200 million Muslims that live in contemporary India, as well as... Parsis, Christians, other people... When he was the chief minister [2001-20014] in Gujarat this led to communal riots, and I'm afraid that India is moving toward that kind of communal violence once again today. ...So that's the pragmatic reason."

"The second reason has to do with the moral basis, which is the protection of human autonomy. ...If you ask, in what sense could a liberal believe that all people are equal, when they differ by skin color, by gender, by intelligence, by many other characteristics. The answer... goes back to the fundamental insight... in the Book of Genesis... that Adam and Eve are told not to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil by God and they disobey Him. ...It gives human beings a moral status that other parts of created nature don't have. They can make moral choices. They can distinguish between right and wrong, and it is that ability to choose morally, that ultimately is what makes us all equal because we share that despite the more superficial differences... [I]t's that right of autonomy... the decisions on what to do in life, where to live, who to marry, what beliefs to engage in. These are all essential characteristics of every human being that every human being wants, and the liberal regime protects that autonomy."

"Then finally, there's a good economic reason for choosing a liberal society because among the rights that liberalism protects is the right to own private property, to transact, to engage in commerce, and therefore it is the basis of a market economy. Liberal societies like England and the Netherlands in the 17th century, were the leaders in terms of creating the modern economic world precisely because they respected property rights and trade. Even Communist China, when it opened up in... 1978, did so by adopting certain liberal principles. Deng Xiaoping allowed peasants to keep the fruits of their labor, and as a result of those incentives, quasi-property rights, agricultural productivity doubled in the space of 4 years, and in general, the most dynamic parts of this amazing Chinese growth story come from the private sector where people are allowed to buy and sell, and... in effect to own property. So even in a... politically illiberal society, economic liberalism has led to tremendous prosperity. So those are the 3 reasons."

"Now the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles, but... is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that were carried to extremes that led... to bad outcomes... [T]here's a move in this direction on the right and... on the left."

"The one on the right concerned the shift from an older understanding of economic liberalism to what is now called "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism is not... a synonym for capitalism. I don't see how you can have any kind of modern economy without a market based economy. Neoliberalism took that basic insight and stretched it to an extreme seeking to deregulate, privatize and basically pull back the role of the state, which many neoliberals regarded as simply obstacles to individuals, to entrepreneurship, to economic growth, and as a result markets did their usual work. They produced a great deal of inequality, as... global corporations searched for very small cost advantages by moving jobs to low cost areas... [T]hey destabilized the global economy in certain important ways by deregulating the financial sector. As a result of the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s and 90s we had an escalating series of financial crises. In the sterling crisis, the Asian financial crisis, Argentina, Russia, and finally culminating in the big American subprime crisis in 2008. The... cumulative effects of this instability were political and they were very serious because many ordinary people were hurt... a lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and the elites that ran these big banks and financial institutions suffered only a momentary disruption in their incomes, and went on to continue to dominate their respective economies... [T]his had a direct impact on the rise of populism in subsequent years, both on the right and on the left."

"On the left you had a different aspect of individual autonomy that was pushed to an extreme, which really had to do with the autonomy that individuals have to create their own lifestyles. ...[T]he basic concept of liberal autonomy has to do with your ability to make moral choices, but as time went on the emphasis came to be not on making the right moral choices within an existing moral framework, but rather to be able to make up that framework on your own, that that was the ultimate expression of individual human freedom, and it has obvious problems for a society because all societies have to be based on shared norms that allow people to coordinate their actions, to communicate, and the like... [I]f you believe that the rules can be... set by anybody and that transgressing existing rules is automatically a good thing, you're not going to have... a stable society."

"There was... an attack on the individualistic premise that underlies liberalism through a new kind of identity politics. There is a liberal form of identity politics that says that liberalism does not live up to its promises of the equal treatment of individuals. So... black people, other racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people, have been marginalized and excluded from... full participation in the promise of a liberal... rule of law... [I]dentity politics was simply a means of mobilizing people and getting them to push for their inclusion. So that's a liberal and... perfectly acceptable and... desirable understanding of identity. But there is another view that's grown up very powerfully, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world... places like the United States or Britain or Australia, where identity politics is seen as an attack fundamentally on the individualistic premise of liberalism. That is to say, individuals are not really free. They're determined by the categories, the racial, gender and other categories into which they are born, and that the society needs to respect not what they do and decide as individuals, but to look first to that category, the racial, ethnic, gender category, and use that as the means of determining... the distribution of resources, hiring, promotion, the other goods that society offers, and that... is fundamentally illiberal. It divides the society which had previously been held together through a set of... common values shared by individuals, into a society of groups, and at the end of that process you can ultimately end up with a place like Lebanon or Bosnia where identity politics... defines the whole of politics...[T]here is a kind of effort to move our modern liberal democratic politics in that kind of identity based direction, coming out of the contemporary left."

"[A] further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world."

"The attack on modern natural science has come from a number of sources... [I]t starts ...on the left with a series of intellectual developments... French structuralism that then develops into post-structuralism, postmodernism and ultimately into different varieties of contemporary critical theory, the premise of which is that there's... a subjectivity in the way that we perceive the world. We don't so much perceive an objective reality, as impose reality on the world through the words that we use. This... culminates... in the thought of Michel Foucault, who's a very brilliant philosophical observer, but he began to argue that... modern science is not an objective cognitive technique, it is really something that elites use to manipulate people... [I]n previous years they could simply order the death of one of their subjects, but now they use science and the authority that science carries, to convince people of certain things that are essentially a way of holding power over them... [H]e applies this to things like incarceration, homosexuality, mental illness and the like, but by the end of his career had... broadened the idea of to... include much of what we understand to be modern natural science, and so the skepticism of science really starts on the progressive left. It has now completely moved over to the nationalist populist right. So during the COVID epidemic and... to the present... there are many people on the extreme right around the world that... argue, just like Foucault, that what the public health authorities are telling you about vaccines or about masking is... not based on objective science. It's based on... the elite desire to manipulate you, and it's really a game about power, rather than about the truth. You combine that with the internet and the new digital technologies that have wiped away all of the former gatekeepers, like the traditional media or... other credible sources of scientific information that used to certify information. You combine that with a principled belief that there really is no such thing as objective truth, and you get the situation... we now face, in which, at least in the United States... we can't agree on whether vaccines are safe, ...who is the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the like..."

"[I]n a liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest... moral frameworks, but you are going to agree on factual information, and... if you can't agree on factual information it's very hard to deliberate in common... [on] what needs to be done in the future, and that's the situation we now face."

"The final thing... the question of the nation, and the role of the nation in liberalism... [T]here would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy... the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into s, in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. ...[T]his contradiction can be bridged because... there is a liberal form of national identity which is not only possible, but... necessary if a liberal society is going to succeed."

"A right exists in theory... [A]ll human beings have the same set of rights, but rights need to be enforced by the state. It needs to rely on the coercive power of the state... its army, its police force, to actually make those rights something real that citizens can enjoy, and the enforcement power is not universal. ...[W]e wouldn't want to live in a world in which every liberal state wanted to enforce liberal rights in every other state in the world."

"The other big issue is an emotional one. We tend to feel the greatest bonds of solidarity with people that are close to us. There are very few true citizens of the world. We're citizens of individual countries and we really feel the closest bonds to people that live within our nation, and therefore... the nation becomes a kind of social glue. But if you're going to make a national identity compatible with liberalism, it has to be the right kind of national identity. It has to be one that is open to all of the citizens that actually live in the territory of the nation. It can't exclude certain groups by race, by ethnicity, by religious belief and the like, and therefore it needs to be an open identity that is based on essentially liberal ideas."

"So this is something... we see happening... in the war in Ukraine. A lot of people raise the question, "Why are Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion as ferociously as they are?" and there's been a little bit of a debate over whether this is due to the fact that Ukrain is democratic, a liberal democracy, and Russia is not, or whether it's simply a fight over sovereignty... I think that that's a false dichotomy because you really don't fight for liberalism as an abstract principle. You fight for it as it is embedded in... your nation... [F]rom my... frequent visits to Ukraine... I believe... that's what's really going on, that Ukrainians want their sovereignty, but the reason they want it so desperately is that they want to have a free Ukraine and not Putin's Ukraine, not a... centralized dictatorship, and that's why they're willing to fight so tenaciously."

"[[Russian invasion of Ukraine|[T]he invasion]]... exhibits in stark terms, the choice that is before us today between maintaining a liberal government that respects the rights of individuals, or moving over to a form of centralized illiberal dictatorship, even if that... illiberal government is somehow democratically legitimated. ...[T]hat's the central issue in global politics today. ...[T]hat's basically what the... Ukraine invasion is about, and that's why... all liberal societies that care about those individual freedoms... have a very powerful interest in the outcome of that war, because Putin and Russia are at the center of an international network of illiberal forces that are seeking to overturn liberal values in virtually every part of the world, and therefore... that's all part of a larger global struggle over our fundamental liberal values."

"[T]he Republican party has really gone off the rails and has become... in many ways a quasi-authoritarian party because many Republicans are not willing to accept the results of a... free and fair election. ...[W]e've learned a lot from the... House committee that's studying the January 6th insurrection... [W]hat that committee has revealed was that this wasn't just a demonstration that spontaneously got out of hand. It was planned very deliberately by the White House as a way of pressuring former vice president Pence to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in office, and right now a lot of state level Republican legislatures are trying to modify their rules for counting votes in the next election so that they would be in a better position to do what they tried to do in 2020, but didn't get away with... [S]o this is probably the most severe threat to American democracy... since the Civil War... and I'm quite worried about that."

"We need a good alternative to Trumpism. There is a majority in favor of that, but... the other party is really not providing that alternative in a very clear way."

"The mainstream media does have a liberal bias, as does a lot of... higher education, academia... and so forth... [A] lot of people see that and they don't like it. ...The problem is that the solution ...offered by the extreme right is... a lot worse... [T]he critics of the mainstream media don't... appreciate that fact that there is diversity... that there are actually journalistic standards that... The New York Times and '... adhere to. All of which is being tossed out the window on the far right... in reaction to the perceived bias. ...[T]here's a difference between bias and outright... lying. So the bias... has to do with what kinds of stories are covered... the kinds of slant that's given to the reporting... but what's going on in large sections of the conservative media is just outright... untruth... people will just make up facts... without sourcing them properly... [T]hat's another sense in which... the solution is a lot worse than the... underlying disease. ...What we need is a responsible right wing media that does adhere to certain basic journalistic standards. ...[T]here's a tendency on the part of everybody to... take particular anecdotes and instances of abuse and then generalize it to say that... the entire media universe is corrupt... without... appreciating the fact that... that's not a universal problem."

"[C]ulture is a much better predictor of populist sentiment than economics. ...[T]he average Trump voter in 2016 had a higher per capita income than the average Hillary Clinton voter, and if you look at the people in the January 6th riot, the vast majority... were comfortable middle class people with good jobs... [T]here is a core... white working class base to Trumpism, but... a lot of the people that are aligned with that movement are there for cultural reasons. They really don't like the kind of identity politics that's being... put forward by the progressive left... [A] lot of Hispanic voters, for example, don't like socialism, and they don't like the fact that the Democrats are using the word socialism as if it's a perfectly normal set of economic choices."

"What's interesting about the world today is that the fundamental division is... a... sociological one between people that have better educations, that live in big urban agglomerations, that then can then benefit from... a global economy, versus people who live in... smaller cities and towns, or in the countryside... with more traditional values. That division exists almost universally, in Turkey... Hungary... the United States, in Britain... [I]t does reflect different economic opportunities, but more fundamentally... it reflects a... way of life, that in the urban case is... liberal and open, but in some cases... people would say a little... too open and too tolerant of... people that want to break traditional norms that are still maintained by... other parts of the population. So it's really that cultural fight... that's at the center of populism, related to,.. but certainly not fundamentally driven by economic inequality."

"[[Identity|[I]dentity]] is something that is universally desired by people. In a liberal society... people can associate based on... identity affiliations... and that they're free to do so... [T]he danger... resides when the state begins to endorse identity categories as... fixed... and then to distribute resources or... access to institutions on the basis of those... That's the point at which... you risk... hardening these notions of identity into self-regarding groups that are living next to each other... In the UK you get state supported religious schools... for Jews, for Muslims, for... other faiths. People should be free in a liberal society to set up private schools... to bring up people in a religious tradition. I don't... see why the state ought to be supporting that, because what you don't want to do is to have... young people educated in closed communities where they have nothing to do with people from other communities. ...[T]hat's fundamentally illiberal... [T]hat's... a mistaken policy that's... going to harden those divisions rather than to encourage a more... open and tolerant society."

"Francis Fukuyama, that emblematic American commentator of the 1980s, gave only the last and most optimistic version of this benign intellectual isolationism. His vision of the irresistible triumph of American liberal capitalism around the world was normally read by Americans as an assurance that their victory would be bloodless. Everyone would soon largely agree with them... The most perceptive alternative analysis was that of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His new model for international relations predicted a world divided into armed and antagonistic blocs on religious lines. Huntington's was the best argument, but it was Fukuyama who wrote the bestseller."

"When the Cold War ended, Francis Fukuyama had stunningly proclaimed that history, humankind’s quest for the good society, had ended with ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. With socialism defeated, no alternatives remained. Barely two decades later, however, history appeared to have resumed and socialism was once again on humanity’s horizon as the 2008 North Atlantic Financial Crisis sent the major capitalist economies into a mire of low growth and austerity while socialist China continued its historic growth spurt. Socialism remained capitalism’s Big Other destined to absorb and annihilate it."

"Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history-and he may have had in mind the end of historical narrative consisting of war and conquest, victors and victims, the kind of history that has been dictated by the patriarchal hierarchical society and that seldom took into account ordinary life, creation, culture at all levels, literature, ideas, everything that happened between wars. But the end of history means the beginning of ecology, both in the broad sense and in the primary sense of the word, which comes from the Greek oikos, meaning "home.""

"Like so many others, the temptation to dunk on Francis Fukuyama for his triumphalist “End of History and the Last Man” is simply too great for me to avoid. The idea that liberal democracy would become the default ruling paradigm globally due to the collapse of its systemic rival, communism, is now, in hindsight, such a ridiculous assertion that anyone asserting it sincerely way back in the 1990s can only be viewed as having been intoxicated while doing so. This is a testament to the impermanence of international relations, statecraft, and the human condition."

"Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality."

"The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't; b] he has a high IQ, but they don't."

""Racism" is to the current era what "unAmericanism" was to the Fifties: a curse word that provides a handy substitute for logical thought."

"Black-white economic inequality is not a problem that America is going to be able to solve any time soon. But, due to our market-dominant majority, our country is rich enough to live with it. In contrast, if our current mass immigration system is allowed to continue, America will become just another country with a market dominant minority. Through government policy, we will have inflicted upon ourselves the kind of ugly society seen in most of the rest of the world."

"America tried to import the two fundamentals of the Swedish welfare state—high welfare payments and an end to social disapproval of illegitimacy—beginning about 1961. In parts of the U.S., such as heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, this worked reasonably well. But American voters were confronted with stunning speed with the realization that African-Americans responded differently than Swedes did to the new incentive structures. Welfare allowed much of African-American society to revert to African-style family structures."

"In parts of the country where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you'll generally find more Republicans. You'll find less in regions where it's expensive. It's a stereotype that a mortgage, marriage, and babies tend to make people more conservative. But it's a true stereotype. That's why it's in the GOP's self-interest to pursue policies that keep demand for housing down (such as limiting immigration) and the quality of public schooling up (such as, well, limiting immigration). The culture wars between Red States and Blue States (i.e Conservative and Liberal, in the perverse contemporary parlance) are driven in large part by objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking."

"We’ve now achieved the worst of both worlds: the educational authorities are committed to anti-male social constructionist ideology, but the pop culture market delivers the crudest, most sexualized imagery. The irony is that when the adult world imposes gender egalitarianism on young people in the name of progressive ideologies, it just makes the young people even more cognizant of their primordial differences."

"Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating."

"What you won't hear, except from me, is that 'Let the good times roll' is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society. … In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan — because, when you get down to it, [the] Japanese aren't blacks."

"Immigration policy, by its very nature, is about discriminating, about selecting whom we should admit and whom we should keep out. It is one of the fundamental responsibilities of our elected representatives because if they don’t decide, inevitably some private interest is going to decide who gets in."

"Just as the managers of a public company have a responsibility to the existing stockholders not to diminish the value of their shares by selling new ones too cheaply to outsiders, our politicians have a moral obligation to the current citizens and their descendents to preserve the scarcity value of their right to live in America."

"Perhaps the most quoted social philosopher of our time famously asked:"

"The Administration and its media shills remain committed to their Grand Strategy of Invade the World - Invite the World. Bomb them over there and indulge them over here. Obviously, when you stop and think about it, that makes no sense whatsoever."

"It becoming ever more clear that the combination of racial gaps in IQ and the IQ taboo acts as a black hole that sucks all the intelligence out of an institution. Racial gaps in achievement are the overwhelmingly dominant fact driving school performance, for instance, but nobody is allowed to mention the IQ gap among the races, so misbegotten nonsense rushes in."

"Besides the multiculturalist and the assimilationist, there's a third position that isn't often invited to the immigration debate: the skeptical realist. On the rare occasions when they are mentioned in polite society, immigration skeptics are dismissed as "extremists"."

"As the empirical case for mass immigration has become less plausible, its advocates have increasingly switched to emphasizing their moral superiority: they don't look out for the general welfare of their fellow citizens, so that makes them better than their fellow citizens."

"In the West, we have easier ways now to make a killing than killing. If Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral-pirate of Elizabethan England, were a young man today, would he emigrate to Somalia to get a start in the piracy industry? Of course not. He’d apply for a job at Goldman Sachs."

"If somebody invented a magic bullet tomorrow that would somehow eliminate racial IQ disparities among all babies born from now on, measurable (though diminishing) gaps in the total population would still exist until everybody alive today is dead in the 22nd century."

"If you analyze a host of real world outcomes using adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty."

"Political correctness is a war on noticing."

"Privilege is basically a form of property, and as John Locke pointed out, property is what makes a civilization rather than a Libyan war zone of Hobbesian anarchy. The world is a better place when people can work constructively to earn privileges, individual and collective, and pass some of them on to their heirs."

"To be preyed upon by those stronger than you is bad enough; but to allow your artists and children to be slaughtered and defiled by barely organized foreigners who could be kept out by simple acts of national self-respect is far more shameful."

"The governments of Europe are confronting an epochal choice in the Mediterranean. Do they allow Europe to remain on course toward inundation by the African population explosion, inevitably turning Florence into Ferguson and Barcelona into Baltimore?"

"Now, you might think that when the old majority becomes a minority, it would then get minority rights. But that’s not how it works. Whites can’t become a certified minority; they will always be the legacy majority. The closer we get to the future when whites are a minority, the more we hear about their ancestors’ sins, their ineradicable hereditary guilt, their corruption of blood."

"One lesson of Irish history might be that it’s better to tolerate your annoying neighbors rather than bring in people from beyond the seas to help you win your petty domestic disputes."

"The logic of concentricism is so obvious that it’s almost never articulated anymore. If you look at people in Peru, Manchuria, or Chad, you’ll notice that they tend to feel the most duties and allegiances toward those whom they consider most like themselves, moderate amounts toward those moderately close to them, and so forth outward and onward. Instead, we now celebrate the anti-logic of leapfrogging loyalties. The Western liberal is noteworthy for feeling loyalty toward his inner circle, then leapfrogging over a whole bunch of folks who are kind of like him but whom he more or less despises, in order to embrace The Other."

"Much of the class hatred in America stems from the suspicions of the intelligentsia that plumbers and mechanics are using their voodoo cognitive ability of staring at 3-D physical objects and somehow understanding why they are broken to overcharge them for repairs. Thus it’s only fair, America’s white-collar managers assume, that they export factory jobs to lower-paid China so that they can afford to throw manufactured junk away when it breaks and buy new junk rather than have to subject themselves to the humiliation of admitting to educationally inferior American repairmen that they don’t understand what is wrong with their own gizmos."

"The progressive stack is basically a measure of how much you aren’t like, say, James Watt, the developer of the modern steam engine, the key invention of the Industrial Revolution. Watt was white, male, Protestant, straight, rich, mechanically skilled, and a scientific genius, so you’d better not be."

"It’s hard to notice dogs that don’t bark, so let me belabor this point a bit. You don’t see Harvard geneticist David Reich announcing that, say, unbeknownst to all previous observers, it turns out that the closest living relations to Samoans are actually Mohawks and Basques, while Tongans are most closely linked to Inuit, Samaritans, and Khoisan. Instead, what is found over and over is that the old anthropologists going all the way back to Linnaeus and Blumenbach in the 18th century tended to arrive at fairly reasonable frameworks for how the human races’ ancestral diversity could be conceptually organized. Lately, there have been interesting discoveries about the deep history of current populations, but few if any shockers about today’s races. Why? Because what we can see is the product of the genes we can’t see. So the arrival of genome sequencing primarily just confirmed what sharp-eyed observers had already noticed about who is related to whom."

"Human beings have always concocted rationalizations for why they deserve privilege. For most of history, a common explanation of why you should be privileged was that your ancestors were warriors and conquerors who had defeated their foes. In 21st-century America, however, the new fashion for asserting your claim to privilege is that you come from a long line of victims and losers. By intention, this leaves white Americans, the descendants of the men who won The Big One and went to the Moon, psychically dispossessed in their own native land."

"I never understood how globalism was supposed to supplant nationalism in the real world because global institutions don’t have many guns. As Stalin cynically asked about a globalist rival of his: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” As we’ve been seeing in recent months, the world ultimately is still organized into territorial states."

"I am uncertain from where comes Twitter’s weirdly Stalinist angle of insisting you show your guilt by deleting your own tweets. Possibly it has to do with Twitter’s legal insistence that you own your own tweets (but you just can’t do anything with them if Twitter decides it doesn’t like you). Hence, Twitter isn’t hitting you, you’re hitting yourself."

"My approach in explaining human society has been to follow the general line of Occam’s Razor that “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer,” or that the simplest feasible explanation is less likely to be contrived for political purposes than a more complicated Occam’s Butterknife rationalization. And as more data continues to accumulate over the decades, my depiction of the way the world works seems to have a better track record than more fashionable theories."

"To climb the career ladder in modern America, you are expected to lie: about race, about crime, about men in dresses."

"Do American leaders still believe that they have the moral right to protect the territory of the American people by force? Or will we unilaterally disarm in the Scramble for America?"

"The Democrats’ master plan is simple: to be the Party of Diversity, with “diversity” defined elastically as being the opposite of a core American. And who is a “core American,” you ask? Well, the more you have in common demographically with George Washington or Ben Franklin, the more of a core American you are, and thus the Bad Guy."

"That diversity is divisive is also a major internal problem for the Democrats. How can they keep their coalition of the margins from turning into a circular firing squad with, say, the fanatical Muslims and gay Jews at each other’s throats? The obvious answer to Democrats has been by giving the fringes of American society a common enemy to hate, fear, and dispossess: core Americans. But this reflex is premised on core Americans being too obtuse to notice, or too polite to mention, all the blood libels being circulated about them. Moreover, the Democrats have set off a Darwinian struggle among their coalition of the fringes to be the top dogs of diversity."

"That which goes unsaid eventually goes unthought."

"One fundamental problem is that widely appealing conspiracy theories demand formidable villains, bad guys who can keep a secret and who adroitly understand how the world works in order to seize the future. But our elites instead seem inept at understanding cause and effect. They are recurrently surprised that, for example, their depolicing drives lead to an explosion of riots, murders, and car crashes."

"If the Associated Press and the like suddenly changing the rules of capitalization to make clear who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys seems childish, well, it is childish. And that’s a key point to understanding the development of anti-whiteism. Wokeness is a puerile, lowbrow, greed-driven, racist tantrum."

"Noam Chomsky recently wrote that America thinks that it owns the world. That is definitely the view of the Bush administration. But the fact of the matter is that the US owes the world. The US “superpower” cannot even finance its own domestic operations, much less its gratuitous wars except via the kindness of foreigners to lend it money that cannot be repaid. I sometimes wonder if the bankrupt “superpower” will be able to scrape together the resources to bring home the troops stationed in its hundreds of bases overseas, or whether they will just be abandoned."

"The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will."

"If we add state capitalism to the [[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] administration’s success in eroding both the US Constitution and the power of Congress, we may be witnessing the final death of accountable constitutional government."

"All of America’s wars except the first—the war for independence — were wars for Empire. Keep that fact in mind as you hear the Memorial Day bloviations about the brave men and women who served our country in its times of peril."

"When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a bait-click commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world."

"The military/security complex has resurrected its Cold War enemy so necessary for its outsized budget and power and intends to keep Russia as The Enemy."

"All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security."

"The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome. What they see now is the West preparing its populations for war. It is this perception for which the West is solely responsible that makes the situation today far more dangerous than it ever was during the long Cold War."

"As strategic and Russian studies are largely funded by the military/security complex, the universities are also complicit in the march toward nuclear war. Republicans are as dependent as Democrats on funding from the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby."

"Paul Craig Roberts characterizes the resulting attitudes [of Western and U.S. intellectuals] as a "fusion of moral scepticism with the demand for moral perfection...""

"Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, has migrated from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the world of 9/11 conspiracy theory and Putin worship."

"Roberts' history of false-flag assertions is certainly well known... Roberts' piece will intrigue that narrow readership fond of fact-lite, rancidly-posited dot-connecting exercises, and repel just about everyone else."

"The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave us the Taliban. The American occupation of Saudi Arabia gave us bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon gave us Hezbollah. Let us see what the American occupation of Iraq is going to give us."

"I have lived half of my life in "Western society" and never encountered those principles [listed by the NYT as "Western" ]. What is wrong with me. … So Mr. Bush stands for "gender equality, religious freedom, scientific inquiry and the rule of law" and I have never noticed?"

"Paris Hilton gets more coverage than Congo, Darfur, Palestine, and Nahr Al-Barid combined."

"First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through."

"Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: • you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is; • you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; • and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. That's why it's on your mind."

"Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step."

"Before you can achieve... you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind... not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. ...Instead, the key ...is managing your actions. ...[T]he real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are."

"The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload."

"The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future."

"If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas."

"[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation."

"The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas."

"[Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like."

"How much of this planning model do you really need..? [A]s much as you need to get the project off your mind."

"In order to... have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. ...[I]n a few seconds, not days."

"The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your oprn loops and options so your mind can... make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions."

"It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind."

"Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ..."

"[A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up."

"I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist."

"When you "have to get organized," you're probably not appropriately invested yet in what you need to get organized for."

"What people call an "Interruption" is simply new input inappropriately managed."

"Freedom to create a mess is proportional to your ability to know what "no mess" is and how to get there."

"Does something have your attention because you want it to, or because you're avoiding it?"

"Your attention will continue to be grabbed by anything until you give it the appropriate attention."

"A big surprise is coming toward you. How clear do you want to be about all your current commitments, when it hits?"

"Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them."

"Valuable thought occurred today to share. Obvious in the moment. Can't retrieve now. Didn't capture. I teach this. Damn."

"GTD essence: attention cleared of residue & distraction, pointed at the right thing."

"The coolest things I do usually aren't on my lists, but because of them."

"There is never enough time to do what you really don't want to do. Time managemet is really value management."

"Good ideas are infinitely available. We've just limited our availablitly to them. The music's not in the radio."

"Your mind receives, remembers, & reminds, & sucks at all 3, compared to an objective external system a la GTD."

"Secret to finding, quickly, the corner pieces, then the outside edges, to the jigsaw puzzle of life: GTD"

"Over-prepare. Then go with the flow."

"Defaulting to ur psyche as ur system instead of an objective one makes maintaining the system too much trouble."

"I've never had to go very far to learn everything I have learned. I just had to care about something & pay attention."

"Get things under control first, then get focused. If your ship is sinking, you don't care where it's pointed."

"Trying to ignore secondarily meaningful things gives them more meaning than they deserve."

"Making decisions requires energy, but not deciding about whether to decide requires even more energy."

"Every thought deserves its own place in the universe. How & where do you capture yours?"

"Eternal #GTD paradox: when you get the principle, the tool doesn't matter. But simultaneosly it matters so much more."

"Clearing the deck is great, but sailing adventurous waters is the real game. (Just can't do it w/out a clear deck.)"

"Great news about lots of email is how consistently it forces you to get clear what's really meaningful to your work/life."

"GTD gives freedom to the right, structure to the left (brains, that is!)"

"Organizations' problems can all be traced to someone not telling the right someone what had their attention, when it did."

"If you figured out why making a list reduces overwhelm & confusion, you'd keep nothing in your head the rest of your life."

"GTD supplies the reset button for all parts of life & work."

"If you admit your wildest dream & uncover why you want it, you have a big key to make tomorrow a better day."

"Simply ask & answer: if we were being wildly successful in fulfilling our purpose, what would it look, sound, & feel like? #SmallBizChat"

"You talk to yourself 50,000 times a day. What's 300 emails? #SmallBizChat"

"If u can't see everything you've committed to, at all levels, you'll be driven by latest and loudest. #SmallBizChat"

"A commitment kept only in your head will be given too much or too little attention."

"Your system is not your tech - it's the nature of the content & the behavior w/which you engage with it."

"Resistance to deciding the next action (before we have to) stems from how it exposes the vulnerability of our intelligence."

"The nature of creative thinking runs counter to the nature of dealing w/its output. Ability & system to do both is freedom. GTD."

"Being in control isn't forceful manipulation but rather highly cooperative engagement w/ what's really going on."

"Making decisions when you can vs. when you have to makes for better decisions."

"Not stopping to really catch up (Weekly Review, GTDers!) means trying to catch up constantly & never getting there."

"You don't have to like your life to get it off your mind. You DO have to renegotiate your agreements w/yourself about it."

"Your ability to deal w/surprise is in inverse relation to the amount of your backlog of "stuff"."

"Whether you know what you're doing or not, efficiency & style are your only improvement opportunities."

"Maximizing is not optimizing. Sustainable engagement wins, in the end."

"Top need for top professionals: psychic space. Fewer distractions & more contexts for thinking. Not more time."

"Is what you're about to do more likely to expand or limit your ability to get what you really want? Executive intelligence."

"How much attention have I given what really deserves my attention today?"

"The less you are driven by what goes on in this material world, the more you will pay attention to its details."

"You'll be motivated to exercise the #GTD method to the degree you really care about what you're doing."

"Perfection is graciously dealing with imperfection."

"Living life in "emergency scan" mode self-perpetuates instead of self-corrects. Deal w/a non-emergency before it is one."

"If you could stop thinking, letting go of trying control your world w/your mind, where would your attention go?"

"#GTD 2.0 = what to do with your head, once it's clear."

""Organization" for most people is simply an incomplete list, or amorphous piles, of still-unclear commitments."

"What do you want to have true? Pick something between total fantasy & 51% believable, get going, & readjust as you learn."

"Point of in-box empty: having a complete, current inventory of what matters, so you deal clearly with what's new & what's now."

"How, and how often, you relate to your system is an essential part of your system."

"Am working as hard as I can to find out what it's OK I'm NOT going to be dong, this weekend!"

"When "this isn't right" changes to "this isn't optimal" in your vocabulary, you've moved up the food chain."

"Cool how many layers of my mind there are to clear, each time I do it...& how different my world is then."

"Only issues in life: u know what u want, but not how to get it; or u don't know what u want. Solution: #GTD"

"An overwhelming amount of potential work to do is cool. Otherwise people would never go to a gym."

"You've really done your job when what's true? (Challenging question for all of us!)"

"If your backlog of stuff isn't zero'd regularly, you're hostage to your own incessant angst that you should."

"Productivity requires expansiveness & spontaneity as much as structure & control."

"If you're already in a mess, you're not free to make one."

"To be free to be spontaneously & creatively shallow requires depth of character & a disciplined focus."

"It takes a healthy sense of self to feel OK with nothing happening in your head."

"Things hold your attention hostage until you give them the appropriate attention."

"Hold still enough to grapple w/the simple questions, & the complexities become clear."

"How can you justify keeping a calendar & still keep most of your other commitments w/yourself in your head?"

"It's hard to say no when you're not aware of everything you've said yes to."

"If u magically had 0 emails, in 10 days you'd be back to what you had. Issue is not volume, but tolerance of backlog."

"The latest & loudest thing in your psyche is seldom the most important thing that should take up residence there."

"Being organized simply means that where something is matches what it means to you. No more, no less."

"Your mind doesn't have one. If it did, it would only remind you of something when you could do something about it."

"Pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, so you can pay attention to what really has your attention."

"Outcome/next-action thinking, before you must, prepares you for when you must. And that time will come."

"The balance you have between drive & patience may be your master key to success."

"Engaging in complexity is a key to simplicity. Fear of it will haunt your inner recesses."

"Your tools are only as good as they serve your intention. What do you want to have true? What Do you need to have viewable re: that?"

"When you know you'll get email to zero, you're free to deal with the ones you choose, when you choose. Most productive."

"Even the smallest knoll to climb, to see a little more than the machine guns firing at me, is salvation."

"Changing what you want to get done takes a second. Recalibrating & getting the new thing to happen is a martial art."

"When you know how, any time, to get to the place where it's all sort of funny, you've mastered GTD."

"Freedom to give full attention to what you want (vs. It being held hostage by unmanaged stuff) is the GTD promise."

"Rivers of creative flow are log jammed w/ heads holding on to incompletions, old business, & avoided decisions."

"What would you do w/more space, if you had it? Without a good answer, you'll not have the juice to really do #GTD."

"Keys to getting things done: know what "done" means & what "doing" looks like."

"Meetings handled well reduce email. Email handled well reduces meetings."

"Organizing without first capturing & clarifying what needs organizing is simply rearranging your angst."

"The greater your confidence w/how to achieve control & focus, as needed, the wilder & crazier you can be."

"Are you overwhelmed pulling weeds, when you really just need to replant the garden?"

"Collect, process, organize & review what has your attention, so you can stop half-trying to be doing all that, constantly."

"My daily meta-map lists: events coming up; major projects for me; emerging interests; my accountabilities."

"The purpose of a purpose? Tunes you to meaningful things you wouldn't be aware of, otherwise."

"Staying in control daily, weekly, & yearly requires different things for each. Handling one doesn't handle the others."

"What would your ideal exec ass't let you know - & when - & where? That should inform your best #GTD system."

"Great question to ask, to relax: What should I consider right now, decide what, and let go?"

"Using your head to manage your life = creativity constipation."

"The present-ness demanded by a crisis is possible w/out crisis. Understand the keys to appropriate engagement. GTD."

"If you're appropriately engaged w/your life, you don't need more time. If you're not, more time won't help."

"What maps do you need to review, to see where you are & what to do next? Core to self-management systems."

"Appropriate focus on the right stuff gives the freedom to not have to focus on anything, on a regular basis."

"Security is for cadavers."

"When you're in the middle of nowhere and you see something moving in the jungle, you're forced to become a creative problem solver."

"In business you wind up trying a lot of things, most of which won’t work. The way you become a good business person is to fail, fail, fail and fail."

"He doesn't do anything small. Everything he does, he does right."

"I've been working with Bill Shatner yea these 40-plus years. He never seems to get it right. I gave him, "It's Takei, as in way." I even said, "as in gay"… I told him, "It's Takei, rhymes with toupee." I thought that would do it."

"A bill recently approved by a Tennessee Senate committee would prohibit teachers in that state from discussing homosexuality in the classroom. The so-called "Don't Say Gay" law is premised on the misguided belief that by not talking about gay people, they can simply make us disappear. I'm here to tell Tennessee and all LGBT youth and teachers who would be affected by this law that I am here for you. In fact, I am lending my name to the cause. Anytime you need to say the word "gay", you can simply say "Takei". For example, you could safely proclaim you are a supporter of Takei marriage. If you're in a more festive mood, you can march in a Takei pride parade. Even homophobic slurs don't seem as hurtful if someone says "That is soooo Takei", and around the holidays, you can sing "Don we now our Takei apparel!"."

"He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn't belong there. And for him to say, slaves have dignity. I mean, doesn't he know that slaves were in chains? That they were whipped on the back. If he saw the movie 12 Years as a Slave, you know, they were raped. And he says they had dignity as slaves or— My parents lost everything that they worked for, in the middle of their lives, in their thirties. His business, my father's business, our home, our freedom and we're supposed to call that dignified? Marched out of our homes at gun point. I mean, this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America."

"I have been hearing for years and years about how the financial services sector pays such exorbitant wages because the people who work there are so immensely talented that they are cheap at $50 million a year. I never particularly bought that line before. But I never imagined that all those Masters of the Universe would do quite this badly. If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain."

"But the homosexual and abortion lobbies are evil twins with the same agenda. Both want the freedom to commit illicit sex without physical or moral consequences."

"At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional … Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer. … This idea popularized by Professor Singer — that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species — is one whose time appears to have come. … What we’re seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others. … animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda."

"Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices."

"Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home."

"Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization."

"Early signs of what the Trump administration may look like: A man associated with and misogyny will be chief strategist; a man rejected for a judgeship because of alleged racism will be attorney general; and an Islamophobe who has taken money from Moscow will be national security adviser. No, this is not satire."

"Look, Trump has been elected, he will be our president and he has the right to choose conservatives. But instead of turning to the many principled Republicans available, he seems drawn to hotheads and bigots, embarrassing himself and our nation."

"Since 9/11, I’ve spent way too much of my time in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Libya, and the U.S. approach in dealing with those security problems has been to rely on the military toolbox and blow things up. We’ve seen that that’s a very expensive toolbox, and I think we’ve underinvested in the women’s empowerment toolbox and the education toolbox, which are also imperfect but are also powerful tools to bring about change."

"One takeaway from this astonishing presidential election is that fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy."

"I think we in the mainstream media — especially cable television — sometimes bungled coverage of Trump. There was too much uncritical television coverage of Trump because he was good for ratings; then there was not enough investigation of his business dealings, racism and history of s, and too much false equivalency that equated the two candidates as equally flawed. More broadly, we in the mainstream media are out of touch with working-class America; we spend too much time chatting up senators, and not enough visiting unemployed steel workers. Yet for all of our sins in the mainstream media, these alt-right websites are both far more pernicious and increasingly influential."

"The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs."

"Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves."

"After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures. You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It's the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It's the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what's actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What's triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large."

"We feel like more than just the sum of a trillion neurons. We feel like more than just three pounds of wet flesh, and so simply describing the brain in terms of its neurotransmitters and neurons and all these chemicals and exciting ingredients doesn't fully grapple with what it feels like to be human, the first person subjective experience of being a conscious being. When you think about the really grand epic questions of neuroscience … what is consciousness? How can we form a scientific explanation for consciousness, for human experience? That is the holy grail."

"As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it."

"Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question."

"The world mistakes Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence."

"Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder."

"From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who happens on a scene of a rape while fleeing the law, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because performed by a murderer?"

"A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can."

"“Sexual exhibitionism—homosexual or heterosexual—is anathema. The heroic and creative inner struggle of an older generation of Gay Greats, exemplified by the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White, was in the Greek tradition: silent and stoic, principled yet private.""

"Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny."

"“Race and crime can be discussed as long as the topic is framed in ‘root-causes’ terms: stick to the Three Ps—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness.”"

"Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin."

"In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people."

"Healthy patriotism is associated with robust particularism – petty provincialism, if you like – and certainly not with the deracinated globalism exhibited by our GI Joes and Janes."

"The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution."

"Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope."

"Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man."

"Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one."

"The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality."

"The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education."

"Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam."

"The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved."

"Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity."

"Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State’s pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of their anger and activism."

"According to the disease theory of delinquency, the arsonist has 'pyromania,' the thief 'kleptomania,’ and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a ‘sex-addict.’"

"On the unfalsifiable theory of global warming:"Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it."

"Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl."

"Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach."

"Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state’s laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism."

"The problem with so many libertarian formulations is that they do not respect reality. Rather, they hold up the libertarian ideal, lament its unattainablility, and refuse to debate the issue until the ideal is achieved. That's intellectually lazy. It's also an affront to reality, the rational man's anchor."

"Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn."

"Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people."

"Like it or not, the modern marvel that was South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the handiwork of the black nationalist movement now dismantling it; but the creation of those persecuted, pale, patriarchal Protestants."

"[Ron] Paul’s vision is as close to The Good Life as we could hope to come in the current ideological climate. Only tinny ideologues encased in worthless ideological armor – worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth – would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul."

"Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)"

"[G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania."

"Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project."

"Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country’s laws."

"Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve."

"Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama—his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence—these came from Kansas, not Kenya."

"If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he was never free in the first place."

"If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market."

"Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others ─ intentionally or unintentionally ─ falls perfectly within the purview of the “night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory”."

"The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule."

"Keynes was to economics as Katrina was to New Orleans."

"Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands. … 'Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action."

"Still – and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary – Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect."

"By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting."

"Government commissions are where accountability goes to die."

"There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do."

"From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man's life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities."

"Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all men, including those who are in power. That men band in a collective called 'government' doesn't give them license to violate individual rights."

"The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back."

"Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy."

"Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment."

"The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace - this magic, organic agora - starts to splutter, and people suffer."

"Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism."

"The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper."

"Progressive policies lead to a regressive society."

"Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload."

"Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return."

"The idea that the Founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The Founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually — their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who're, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it."

"The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness."

"In an effort to create reality on the ground - instead of reporting on it - the American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism."

"Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women — Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice — who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids."

"The titan is tired. We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don't need our friends looking to us to do so."

"Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

"The United States has already passed on as the world’s economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

"The prototypical WASP is flabby in body and mind. He is fearful and easily cowed. He erupts in tears at a drop of a hat. He is gripped by the culture of apology, and flagellates over sins he has not committed. His eternal state of expiation is driven not by goodness, but by insufferable self-righteousness."

"Europeans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man."

"Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes."

"From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be."

"A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa."

"When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West."

"America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However, even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn't, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed "The White Tribe of Africa.""

"By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate."

"Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place? Such an investigation political correctness prohibits."

"Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one's life and property—are best invested."

"A bully's universe: US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world."

"In Syria, we witnessed "a successful attempt by the Russians at replacing bully power with a balance of power.""

"If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed—I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund for Washington whores. The prostitutes would be the patriots."

"In a democracy, thumping majorities prevail."

"Men in authority are now a threatened minority."

"‘You didn't build that’ will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host."

"Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism."

"Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not 'unintentional' when you know it is inevitable."

"A right that can't be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man. It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights."

"Most people would define treason as a betrayal of one's country or sovereign. In my book, the book of natural law, treason is properly defined as a betrayal of one's countrymen—and, in particular, the betrayal of the individual's right to life, liberty and property. (To your question, yes, this renders almost all politicians traitors by definition.)"

"The glue of American togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. ‘Ideas’ they call it. On the one day, it's a crusade for democracy; on the next, it's a war against racism."

"A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending)."

"The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the Immoral values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children."

"The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage)."

"It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory."

"But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand'... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?"

"Distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them. We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world's citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods. A just government’s duty is to its own citizens first."

"He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war."

"The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system."

"[T]rade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war."

"Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent."

"There are just too many Americans grubbing for free stuff and a preponderance of Republicans eager to parcel it out in exchange for power."

"[M]embers of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth."

"In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off."

"The Big-Media collective is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they'll recognize it, much less report it."

"Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry."

"What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell."

"Certain bedrock principles — arguably a true conservative mindset — dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing[…] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic."

"Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language."

"A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia."

"To the American media, mining Mandela's legacy has meant repeating the man's fortune-cookie profundities and warmed-over wisdom."

"A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional – a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure."

"…free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler."

"Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture… American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation."

"In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along—there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, 'independent' regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections."

"The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another."

"Think of lab rats racing through a maze, when you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel 'dialogue' … Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a 'maze-bright' rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth."

"As a Special-Forces commander, Sharon was on the front—and in front of his men — performing daring assaults that saved Israel in both the 1967 and 1973 wars. Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was, nevertheless, a soldier in the style of 'Stonewall' Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter, to whom he and the Likudniks were often compared."

"If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be."

"Most matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary. So much for Alexander Hamilton's promise, in Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788), that the Judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of his proposed government."

"… we’re not all the same. A common liberal refrain … is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don’t see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That’s liberal logic for you."

"Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game."

"Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic."

"B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach."

"A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey ‘hairs and no-hairs’ to ‘black hairs’—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S."

"Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does."

"The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility."

"Whether arrived at through reason or revelation… natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just."

"Round and round will Americans be compelled to ride on a mindless, manufactured, racial carousel … for without it, the edifice of an industry built upon grievance and excuse-making is destined to collapse."

"By going on the defensive... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from “polite” company."

"Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state's warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus."

"Mrs. Clinton’s riches are not capitalism’s reward for hard work. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others."

"Iraq hasn't suddenly 'slipped back into' this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn't know Shiite from Shinola. [translated from German]"

"You'll get your free IUDs and morning-after-pills, if not from your employer or the insurers — then from the increasingly desperate taxpayer (who, by now, might even consider paying for a spaying, too)."

"Ask yourself: "Do I police what people say for political propriety? … do I scrutinize great literature, music, art, television or comedy for signs of so-called sexism, racism, elitism, homophobia, antisemitism and meanness? Am I incapable of appreciating a superbly written script or book; a sublime painting or symphony; a smart stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violate the received laws of political correctness?"

"Ask any left-liberal American Jew if he supports a 'Right of Return' to Israel proper for every self-styled Palestinian refugee, and he'll likely recoil: 'Are you meshuga? Never! That's a euphemism for Israel's demise.' The very thing he rejects for Israel, the liberal Jew is inclined to champion for America: a global right of return to the US for citizens of the world."

"An American writer's intellectual energy ought to focus on American interests, first. Personal probity demands it! Otherwise, the columnist is a fifth column."

"The sight of the Yazidis driven up the arid, exposed mountain range, chased by the militant Sunni of the Islamic State (ISIS), conjures Masada, A.D. 73, where Jews chose to die on their own terms."

"This White House fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage."

"By all means, argue against laws that prohibit victimless 'crimes' on the ground that these disproportionally ensnare blacks. But do not err in accusing all cops of targeting blacks, when the former are entrusted with enforcing the law, and the latter violate the law in disproportion to their numbers in the general population."

"Leave ISIS to Syria, Tehran and Tel Aviv. Let the locals take out their trash."

"Opposing the policies of the American state is not synonymous with opposing 'America.' It is possible to disavow every single action taken by the U.S. government and still love the 'little platoons' of America, as Edmund Burke described a man's social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers. By logical extension, it is dishonest to malign those who assign the 'bad' category to the state, on the ground that they hate 'America.'"

"Good immigrants come to America to be part of the 'little platoons' that make up its glorious private economy: the people of Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald's, Amazon, Google, Marriot, Mattel, FedEx, Costco, Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Overstock.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and millions of local franchises run by innovative, everyday Americans. Bad immigrants come to America to partake of the state."

"Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite."

"It's always good to see gender set-asides and affirmative action—in particular, the delusion that women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers, security guards, firefighters and cops—hurt those who inflict it on non-believers."

"If not by design at least by default; reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence."

"“From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of America’s creation.”"

"“Obama didn’t build what he has; he got it by grant of government privilege.”"

"The road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and generally, associate at will. As a paleolibertarian, however, my idea of liberty is never propositional–it is not a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values."

"The paleolibertarian grasps that liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure."

"Like left-liberals, "lite libertarians"—they're the kind that is afflicted with the same spineless conformity; a deformation of the personality euphemized as political correctness—are incapable of appreciating a script or book; a painting or symphony; a stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violates the received laws of political correctness."

"The night-watchman state of classical liberalism would keep murderers out of the country, not in."

"The media lie so much, that when stuff happens that scares them, they no longer know where to turn for the truth."

"Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society."

"Western foreign policy is a necessary but insufficient reason for Muslim aggression."

"At the annual White House Sycophants' Dinner, the most pretentious people in the country, in politics, journalism and entertainment - not the country's natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy - convene and revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us."

"Where, pray tell, are those 'made in Russia' labels? Other than crude and commodities; Kalashnikovs (AK-47s) and Vodka – what does post-communist Russia peddle?"

"Tyranny strives for uniformity."

"Demographics need not be destiny. The West became the best not by out-breeding the undeveloped world... but because of human capital; people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy."

"The Articles of Confederation, which were usurped in favor of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention, are better founding documents than the Constitution."

"The individual living in America as it was meant to be would be free to run his business as he wishes, associate with those he likes, dissociate from those he dislikes or disapproves; hire, fire, rent to or evict from, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. This hypothetical free man is at liberty to bruise as many feelings as he likes, so long as his mitts stop at the next man's face. So long as he harms nobody's person or property, our mythic man may live as he wishes to live."

"Anti-discrimination law is inconsistent with freedom of association and the right of private property."

"Programmed from on high, Europeans, like Americans, are bound by the suicide pact of political correctness to open their borders to the huddled mass of Third World people, no matter the consequences to their societies."

"Republicanism is so meaningless a political identity that a Democrat can just as easily transition to being one, without too much pain."

"Another dynamic is at play in the region besides the Sunni-Shia divide. It is that between the forces of centralization and the forces of decentralization. As a rule, the U.S. sides with the former; the Arab people with whom we meddle generally side with the latter. Given the tribal, familial focus of their societies; Arabs are unlikely to abandon their particularism in favor of American statism."

"Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a 'War for Southern Independence.' They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way."

"Propensities for crime are irrelevant in a discussion about the murder of an individual — Ms. Kathryn Steinle and all other victims of criminals who should not be in the U.S. For these deaths have nothing to do with aggregate crime rates; they're about individuals who should be alive: a baby that should have been born, a girl who should be among the living, young men and women who should not be dead. To justify the crime-probabilities line-of-inquiry in the context of killer Francisco Sanchez' presence that day on the San Francisco pier, you would need to show that had Sanchez been deported or jailed or turned back at the border—his victim, Ms. Steinle, would nevertheless have suffered the same fate at the hands of a native murderer. The same eventuality would need to be demonstrated with respect to each individual victim of a criminal alien. The implication is crushingly stupid."

"In America, black is beautiful. To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage — heavier than the Holocaust — and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores. To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society. To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Own You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing."

"Like no other, drug legalization is a proxy black issue, worthy of the endorsement of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement."

"A professional politician is opportunistic and parasitic. For his survival, he must feed off his hosts. To convince the host to let him hook on and drain his lifeblood, the political hookworm must persuade enough of them to believe his deception. The energies of this political confidence trickster are thus focused on gaining voter confidence by promising what will never be delivered and what is impossible to deliver."

"Henpecked though he was by the Murdoch Media's golden goose — Megyn Kelly — Trump demonstrated that he is what his constituency craves: A man in the old mold."

"Fox News' Megyn Kelly has fast succumbed to the female instinct to show-off, bare skin, flirt and wink. She now also regularly motormouths it over the occasional smart guest she entertains (correction: the one smart guest, Ann Coulter). At the same time, Kelly has dignified the tinnitus named Dana Perino with a daily slot as Delphic-oracle."

"Guns are not the root cause of man's evil actions... Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can't be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay. Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood."

"Canada is a high-wage area. The U.S. is a high-wage area. Latin America is a low-wage area. Migratory pressure flows from low-wage to high-wage regions; from the Third World to the First World (until migratory equilibrium is reached when First World becomes Third World)."

"According to liberal liturgy, if not for largely exogenous circumstances—all human beings would be capable of similar accomplishments. Many a co-opted scientist will second the political dictum that there is no such thing as general intelligence. Speak, if you must, about the phenotype—even genotype—of all individual traits other than intelligence. As for the possibility of group genotypic intelligence: Don't go there!"

"Neoconservatives are still in the business of creating their own parallel reality and forcing ordinary Americans, Europeans and Middle-Easterners to inhabit the ruins."

"If America busies itself not with elective wars, but with commerce, the shift in power and prestige will be away from politicians who prosecute wars, and back to The People who produce prosperity."

"Jews like presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders have forgotten that riches are a reward for work well done. In the Jewish faith's infinite wisdom, wealth justly acquired is a sign of God's blessing."

"Be it Hillary Clinton or burn-the-wealth Bernie Sanders — both agree that it is up to them, the all-knowing central planners, to determine how much of your life ought to be theirs to squander."

"Like gun laws, spy laws, courtesy of the Surveillance State, oppress only law-abiding, harmless individuals."

"Donald Trump's political rivals look at the price exacted by a Muslim like Syed Farouk and his bride in the aggregate. To a politician, 14 lives in 322 million is a small price to pay for 'our freedoms.' Fourteen dead in San Bernardino is not a steep price to pay for unfettered immigration from Islamic countries, peddled politically as 'our values,' 'our tolerance,' 'our greatness.' This callous calculus is second nature to neoconservative politicians like Lindsey Graham or Darth Vader Cheney. Not to Trump."

"Said Saint Augustine, 'The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.' The Republican Party under Bush did the devil's work. Bar the sainted Ron Paul, not a dog of a Republican lifted his leg in protest of the unjust war on Iraq. To embark on the good, the GOP must come clean about the bad."

"Donald Trump has buried George W. Bush, for good. Or so we hope. This might not be 'Morning in America,' but it is a moral victory for values in America. Somewhere in those Judeo-Christian values touted by 'values voters' is an injunction against mass murder."

"We do know. We can say for sure. And we have all the documents. George W. Bush lied America into war."

"In the classical conservative and libertarian traditions values are private things. They must be left to individuals and to civil society to practice and police. Party and state operatives have police powers with which to back their 'values.' Therefore, never-ever are they to preach or police The People's values."

"The no-longer-silent majority is exhausted, sick-and-tired of being racially ramrodded. They've had enough of the pigment burden."

"I don't know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don't have free trade. What goes for 'free trade' is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people."

"Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. Within this voluntary, mutually beneficial relationship, I give up an item I value less, for something I value more: a fee for the desired product or service. My trading partners, whose valuations are in complementary opposition to mine, reciprocate in kind. Ceteris paribus (all other things being equal), there's nothing wrong with my running a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist or my GTI dealer, as I do—just as long as I pay for my purchases. However, the data demonstrate that Americans, in general, are not paying for their purchases."

"“Democrat Grover Cleveland was America’s last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that ‘the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people.'”"

"While the Left controls the intellectual means of production—schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), media, foundations, think tanks, publishing prints—the 'Respectable Right' is hardly on the outs with the liberal smart set."

"Republican presidents who've talked and acted conservatively are as elusive as Big Foot. There hasn't been a sighting in maybe a century. A purist would cite Democrat Grover Cleveland as America's last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that 'the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people."

"When it comes to philosophical convictions, most conservatives more closely resemble their beltway liberal friends than Republican Party voters. From the country's dismal finances and propagandized population, a sizable segment has concluded that conservative power-brokers and liberal power-brokers are indistinguishable."

"One defining issue over which New Conservatives and liberals practically converge: Islam is peaceful, except for a few bad Abduls."

"Centuries of Islam, transmitted through mother's milk, cannot be tweaked out of the Muslim DNA like some unsightly nose-hair."

"Survival—of the species of the culture of the faith—has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies—sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa?"

"At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You're meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them. It is, however,deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they're worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance."

"The following quotes are taken from Mercer's column "The Third Degree à la Germany," Townhall.com, Nov 29, 2016, in which she answers the Junge Freiheit questionnaire."

"I‘m strictly reality oriented. I don’t indulge in make-believe. I don’t wish to be where I’m not."

"I’d give "anything" for freedom from The State, provided "anything" is a figure of speech (no limbs, eyes, etc.)"

"(When asked - "What do you consider important in life?") "Meaningful work, intellectual honesty (rare), close relationships, good health, my guns, my companion parrot (Oscar-Wood), related advocacy and charities.""

"The concept of a Favorite Book is childish, if you’re a lifelong reader. Lots of books of political theory, philosophy and economics have indelibly influenced my thinking."

"In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," instead of "life, liberty and property." With that vagueness, Jefferson undermined the foundation of civilization: private property right."

"Traditionalists value hierarchy. An infantile, immoral society deifies The Child. Kids should follow Florence King's injunction that "children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, 'Do you have enough room in the toes?'"

"“Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained ‘natural’ order—liberal social engineers encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re white.”"

"“The Left's delayed Russophobia is about a century too late.”—ILANA MERCER,"

"Mythical thinking thrives in a culture that eschews objective truth: ours."

"Where once there was an understanding that a reality independent of the human observer exists; students are now taught that truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position—or lack thereof—of persons or groups in society."

"“Obama is a case study in hubris.”"

"“The countdown to President-elect Trump's inauguration has morphed into a search-and-rescue for the Barack Obama legacy, except that when something is dead; it becomes a recovery operation.”"

""Audacity we won't miss: Obama praised his spoilt daughters for graciously wearing 'the burden of years' of life in the lap of luxury (courtesy the taxpayer), a sentiment his wife, Michelle Antoinette Obama, seconded.”"

"An historical, national Jewish right to the city of Jerusalem does not extinguish the property rights of individual Arab homesteaders acquired over the years. Muslims residing in East Jerusalem must just learn to extend to their Jewish neighbors the courtesy their Muslim brethren receive from their Jewish neighbors, in Israel proper. In other words, allow Jews to live in peace. Or, just to live."

"Quick quiz: What does 'unoccupied' or 'liberated' Palestinian land look like? Answer: Like Gaza."

"Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State's role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values."

"Because our form of government is incompatible with the enforcement of values, the American People can't and mustn't welcome into their midst civilizations whose values are inimical to the survival of their own."

"In adding Iran to the travel ban, President Trump is clearly appeasing the neoconservative snakes slithering around his administration. They’re fixing for a fight with Iran, stupidly collapsing the distinction between the Iranian State (sponsor of terrorism), and the Iranian people (who’re not the reason the Eiffel Tower is being walled-off by bullet-proof glass)."

"It’s not right-wing populism that endangers Jewish survival in Europe and Canada; it’s the influx of Muslims. There’s nothing new in the Jewish leadership’s habit of kibitzing about the dangers to Jewish continuity from marauding Mormons (their sin is to convert dead Jews). Or, from Mel Gibson, whose movie “The Passion of the Christ” was supposed to unleash pogroms in Pittsburgh, as they falsely prophesied."

"I hope I speak for Deplorables when I say this: The only time you want the president to reach across the aisle on matters immigration is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat."

"By upholding the moral order, President Trump is also restoring the natural order inverted by his predecessors. The feminist order of Obama had humiliated thousands of American men-of-action by turning them into wet-nurses."

"On ICE agents minding illegal alien minors: "By upholding the moral order, President Trump is also restoring the natural order, inverted by his predecessors. The feminist order of Obama had humiliated thousands of American men-of-action by turning them into wet-nurses.""

"Look forward to epic images of heavy equipment barreling toward the Southern border. The sight of a gold-plated structure going up, as sections of the borderland along Mexico start to resemble Liberace's backyard: This is sure to warm the cockles of your heart, and make America's monomaniacal media go berserk."

"If a veteran political operative like Barack Obama is considered beyond reproach, incapable of abusing power—all the more so is it irrational, irresponsible and in Third-World style to hound an administration not yet fully assembled or ensconced, for a political past it lacks. Sane people must walk away from Fake News' Russia Ruse."

"We dare not suggest that a civilization created by a particular people with a particular religious and racial profile, may well perish once those people are replaced or have engineered their own replacement."

"The idea of the American 'creedal nation,' which is supposed to unite us all in 'a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals,' is abstract and inorganic. This creed comes from above, not from below. It's a state religion reflexively developed to bring about compliance."

"In Cool Britannia, the moniker the Island acquired in the times of trendy Tony Blair, the only way disarmed Britons may shoot a savage is with ... a camera."

"The category of 'criminal' (according to incontrovertibly correct libertarian political theory) entails the outlaw criminal class—it needs no introduction—and the legalized criminal class: the politicians."

"Life with Islam is life under Islam and its enablers."

"Look at Jared Kushner. The poor man looks low T—like he might one day go the way of Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner. (I love LGBTQ, so long as they come in peace.) Jared's not wearing the pants in the Kushner castle. The beguilingly beautiful Ivanka is."

"Actors are a troupe that makes a living pretending to be something they're not. Professional poseurs, if you like. Granted, they're not parasites, like the politicians with whom they cavort. But Tinseltown is a left-liberal ideological collective. They march in thematic unison. That their cultural products have become artistically worthless could well be because activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories and good scripts. Hollywood is a pretty, pea-brained community."

"Those gathered at the Annual Correspondents' Dinner, or their Christmas party, are not the country's natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy. No matter how poor their predictive powers, no matter how many times they get it wrong—in war and in peace—the presstitutes always find time for this orgy of self-praise."

"Like nothing else, the annual Correspondents' Dinner is a mark of a corrupt politics. It's a sickening specter, where some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome's provinces."

"The White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD) should have been more appropriately called the Sycophants' Supper. Would that it was the last such supper."

"Satire in the US has been killed off by the twin tyrannies of political correctness and affirmative action."

""The more abstract the expert Idiocracy gets in defining what is murder-by-Muslim immigrant, the more removed will be their solutions—removed from solutions that are at once achievable and the legitimate purview of limited government.”"

"ISIS and an abstract ideology called 'radical Islamic terrorism'—a redundancy, if ever there was one, since Islam unreformed is radical—are not attacking us. Men and women upon whom we've conferred the right to live among us are."

""Nations whose institutions promote cultural relativism and hate of the dominant culture have no business importing the sort of immigrant who'll be quick to act on an ideology of hate—be it the self-hate of the host, or the hate in Jihad.”"

"In the US, Great Britain and Western Europe, state and civil society acculturate immigrants into a militant identity politics. Essentially, newcomers are taught to hate their hosts."

""Wars are generally a rich man's affair and a poor man's fight.”"

"There was no man more valorous and courageous than Robert E. Lee."

""'Deep State' is no conspiracy theory. There's nothing mythical about the Republican and Democratic career government workers, embedded like parasites in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the military, and a like-minded media, who've risen on their hind legs to protect their turf and protest an agenda that leaves them out in the cold.”"

"The anatomy and workings of the Deep State are reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Simple psychology—human nature at its worst—sees government jobs and programs, war and welfare alike, protected in perpetuity and at all costs by the administrators of government jobs and programs."

""Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus. But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire.”"

"The tools threatening President Trump with impeachment have one bag of tricks stuffed with power tools: they audit, indict, arrest, bomb, change regimes. They don't make profitable business deals; they tax them. They don't make peace; they wage war."

"The president's linguistic infelicities—a word salad, at times—have given the press popinjays and their Washington overlords the foothold needed to go after the president. Throw in the 'bad' habits of a businessman he has retained. Trump transacts with everyone—Russians too. We voted for deals, not wars. This is the sum and substance of President Trump's offenses. That, and beating Hillary Clinton to the White House."

"“President Trump is too set in his ways and independent-minded to imbibe the layers of debased semiotics with which government lawyers routinely rape reality.""

"The manufacturing of Fake News by the Deep State, circa 2017, is of a piece with the anatomy of the ramp-up to war in Iraq, in 2003. Except that back then, Republicans, joined by diabolical Democrats like Hillary Clinton, were the ones dreaming up Homer Simpson's Third Dimension."

"To comprehend the hysterical mass contagion that is the war on Trump it's essential to trace the contours of that other war, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom,' and the way it was peddled to the American public."

"When you're the most powerful entity in the world, as the US government certainly is—the only government to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations ('good' bombs, because dropped by the US)—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What's more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into 'sharing' your alternate reality. Or else."

"Contemporary Americans are less likely to read the Declaration of Independence now that it's easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution."

"Our bickering wards in the Middle-East aren't about to forget their religious jealousies and join forces, certainly not under American guardianship. The conflicts are regional, tribal, ancient. They're impervious to outside, top-down intervention."

"America's foreign police is Disneyfied production, starring, invariably, an evil dictator who was killing his noble people, until, high on paternalism, America rode to the rescue."

"Arisen online and beyond is a niche-market of nudniks (nags): Women talking, blogging, vlogging, writing and publishing about women in high-technology or their absence therefrom; women beating the tom-tom about discrimination and stereotyping, but saying absolutely nothing about the technology they presumably love and help create."

"Statistics are silly unless given context. If you have one foot in fire, the other in ice, can we legitimately say that, on average, you're warm? Hardly. Probabilities, in this case the chance that any one of us will die-by-Muslim, are statistically insignificant—unless this happens to you or to yours, to me or mine."

"Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life," American Thinker, August 20, 2017."A natural-rights libertarian values the life of the innocent individual. Only by protecting each individual's rights—life, liberty and property—can the government legitimately enhance the wealth of the collective. Only through fulfilling its night watchman role can government legitimately safeguard the wealth of the nation. For each individual, secure in his person and property, is then free to pursue economic prosperity, which redounds to the rest."

"Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways."

"'Taking the knee' is like taking a pee. It's a waste. It speaks to the inward-looking, ego-driven, vain posturing of the Left and its perpetually seething, predatory racial coalition. They're bent on extracting something from innocent, ordinary Americans who owe them nothing."

"From the fact that a man or a community of men lacks the intellectual wherewithal or cultural and philosophical framework to conceive of property rights—it doesn't follow that he has no such rights, or that he has forfeited them. Not if one adheres to the ancient doctrine of natural rights."

""Liberalism and libertinism are intertwined. The more liberal a woman, the more libertine she'll be—and the more she'll liberate herself to be coarse, immodest, vulgar and plain repulsive."

"If men flashed for freedom as women do; they'd be arrested, jailed and placed on the National Sex Offender Registry."

"The power of the average pop artist and her products lies in the pornography that is her 'art,' in her hackneyed political posturing, and in the fantastic technology that is Auto-Tune (without which all the sound you'd hear these 'singers' emit would be a bedroom whisper)."

""No war makes Johnny McCain a sad boy.”"

""Our soldiers have been propagandized to conflate fighting for American freedom with fights in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali."

"The fact that there are moderate Muslims doesn't mean there is a moderate Islam."

"Violent Jihad is not an ideology, as our Moderate Muslim friends keep calling it. Jihad is a pillar of a faith. That faith is Islam."

"All Muslims can thrive in America. But not all Americans will thrive in the presence of Muslims. This is because the faith of Muslims is Islam. And Islam—the real or the imposter variety; it matters not—predisposes to violence. Some Americans will be hurt or die as a result of importing members of this militant faith."

"“It is in Man’s nature to dislike those who are unlike him - all the more so when they, as a group, have accomplished what he has not.”"

"“The price of labor in the high-tech labor market is a function of a political, artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants. Prattle about the price at which American workers will do certain work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—communities. Render asunder the quaint idea of borders—and the world is your labor market; communities be damned. Realize that this ceaseless supply of labor is maintained not through peaceful market forces, but through the use of political power, wielded by wealthy men and women with access. At work here is their Brave New Borderless World, not the invisible hand we love.”"

"The H-1B visa racket is, however, a taxpayer-subsidized, grant of government privilege. Duly, profits remain private property. The costs of accommodating an annual human influx are socialized, borne by the bewildered community."

"Why have the leaders of the most powerful country on the African continent (Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma) succored the leader of the most corrupt (Mugabe)? These South African strongmen were, in a manner, saluting the Alpha Male Mugabe by implementing a slow-motion version of his program. When he socked it to the whites, Mugabe cemented his status as hero to black activists and their sycophants across South Africa."

"The object of creating bogus categories of crime is to leverage power over adversaries; to scare them."

"Ultimately, the State has overwhelming power when compared to the limited resources and power of an accused."

"An easy way for the government to create criminality where there is none is to make it a crime to lie to its agents, in this case the FBI, which is Deep State Central."

"Undergirding what Christians call the Old Testament is a message of particularism, not universalism."

"Corruption invariably flows from state to society."

"How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism? In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives—aka Conservatism Inc.—did the same. Having consistently complained of his isolationism, the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism. To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand."

"On "shithole countries": "What makes a country, the place or the people? Does the country create the man or does the man make the country? The answer is no chicken-or-egg quandary. Human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being's worth. The aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert is what makes or breaks a society. In other words, it is the individual who creates the collective, not the other way around. The Man makes the country what it is.""

"Football fetish: "We all inhabit this busy mart called America, but are united by nothing meaningful at all. The football fetish in America has intensified in the context of a country whose inhabitants agree on little else than the importance of The Game. Consequently, come playoff time, we come together fleetingly and superficially, to make a religion out of our respective professional football teams.""

"Cannabis: The reason it's not in the Constitution is because letting states and individuals decide is in the Constitution. That thing of beauty is called the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

"Complaints about the damage done to our "democracy" by outsiders are worse than silly. Such damage pales compared to what we Americans have done to a compact rooted in the consent of the governed and the drastically limited and delimited powers of those who govern."

"Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy. To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic."

"“How did the mythical land of Saint Nelson Mandela turn into Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’? How did that country’s ‘vaunted’ constitution yield to ‘the horror, the horror’ of land theft? Easily, even seamlessly …”"

"“South Africa’s Constitution is descriptive, not prescriptive—full of pitch-perfect verbal obesities that provide little by way of recourse for those whose natural, individual rights are violated. As a protector of individual rights to life, liberty and property, it’s worse than useless—a wordy and worthless document.”"

"What comes out of the Trump White House is an ideological cacophony. Hiring different perspectives in business could well be a strength. But it's a weakness when politics and policy are in play. Needed to advance a political agenda is a team that shares the political philosophy underlying the agenda."

"“The American Idiocracy is moving to equate merit-based institutions with institutionalized racism.”"

"Effects of affirmative action: "No longer beholden to the unifying, overarching value of merit, institutions become riven by tribal feuds and factional loyalties—both in government and in business alike, where it is well-known that newly arrived 'minorities' hire nepotistically.""

"The only potential immigrants who still have that frontier spirit are South-African farmers. But American and European elites are uninterested in refugees who are ACTUALLY and actively being killed-off. That would be too much like preserving 'white privilege.'"

""Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they'll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. For example, when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco's Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock be exterminated because it wasn't indigenous. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained 'natural' order—liberal central planners encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they're Caucasian.”"

""The liberal program aims to dissolve 'the constitution of man' in the service of sexual sameness. It is predicated on the imbecilic belief that biology is incidental, and that men and women are essentially interchangeable.”"

"The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward 'The Other,' while readily accusing others of the same. It's as though liberal men derive erotic pleasure from prostrating themselves to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making."

"If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be. Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary."

"In the postmodern tradition, the pseudo-academics behind the concept of white privilege have invented for themselves an artificial, political construct. Political constructs confer power on those who dream them up. For politics is the predatory process through which the figment of sick minds is weaponized."

"As the left sees it, if America isn't going to police the world; it must at least provide shelter to all people from unpoliced parts of the world."

"To the commentariat of CNN, MSNBC and BBC, wanting a place you can call home while white is … racist."

"It should be news to no one that American refugee policies favor the Bantu peoples of Africa over its Boers."

"Once illiberal, unassimilable people gain 'numeric superiority,' they will turn their population advantage into political advantage, using the host population's liberalism against it."

"The sounds emanating from the uterine core of the Democratic Party are the subhuman grunts and growls one hears from animals in estrus or mid-feed. Something is terribly wrong with them.""

"Democrats demonstrate daily that they’re not for the rule of law, but for the law of rule, mob rule."

"The Democratic Party has come to be controlled by hysterical women and their domesticated man servants. In conduct, these Democratic women are more feral than female."

"“A Democratic takeover promises to be a bitch for ordinary men.”"

"The anti-Trump protest ongoing is not cerebral or visceral, it’s gynocentric. And it’s expressly anti-male."

"Unite we Americans do over the state of our sovereign debt—it's bad! But not over what it means to be a sovereign people."

"Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.”"

"To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty."

"In the universe where everything works the way it common-sensically ought to, everything about the study of Artificial General Intelligence is driven by the one overwhelming fact of the indescribably huge effects: initial conditions and unfolding patterns whose consequences will resound for as long as causal chains continue out of Earth, until all the stars and galaxies in the night sky have burned down to cold iron, and maybe long afterward, or forever into infinity if the true laws of physics should happen to permit that. To deliberately thrust your mortal brain onto that stage, as it plays out on ancient Earth the first root of life, is an act so far beyond "audacity" as to set the word on fire, an act which can only be excused by the terrifying knowledge that the empty skies offer no higher authority."

"I have sometimes thought that all professional lectures on rationality should be delivered while wearing a clown suit, to prevent the audience from confusing seriousness with solemnity."

"It would actually be quite surprisingly helpful for increasing the percentage of people who will participate meaningfully in saving the planet, if there were some reliably-working standard explanation for why physics and logic together have enough room to contain morality."

"Declaring yourself to be operating by "Crocker's Rules" means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker's Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind — if you're offended, it's your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Crocker's Rules should be able to communicate all relevant information in the minimum amount of time, without paraphrasing or social formatting. Obviously, don't declare yourself to be operating by Crocker's Rules unless you have that kind of mental discipline. Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received — not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor."

"If you declare Crocker's Rules, other people don't need to worry about being tactful to you. (You still need to worry about being tactful to them — Crocker's Rules only work one way.)"

"Crocker's Rules didn't give you the right to say anything offensive, but other people could say potentially offensive things to you, and it was your responsibility not to be offended. This was surprisingly hard to explain to people; many people would read the careful explanation and hear, "Crocker's Rules mean you can say offensive things to other people.""

"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

"People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy."

"Ever since I adopted the rule of "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," I've also come to realize "That which the truth nourishes should thrive." When something good happens, I am happy, and there is no confusion in my mind about whether it is rational for me to be happy. When something terrible happens, I do not flee my sadness by searching for fake consolations and false silver linings. I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light — I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say."

"Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge."

"But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance."

"Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there."

"If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing."

"The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge."

"The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman — who is only a mere superhero."

"Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit."

"Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come."

"The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over."

"People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can't see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside. And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are—and discarded as obviously wrong."

"Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality."

"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model."

"The nature of "reality" is something about which I'm still confused, which leaves open the possibility that there isn't any such thing. But Egan's Law still applies: "It all adds up to normality." Apples didn't stop falling when Einstein disproved Newton's theory of gravity. Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2."

"If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance."

"Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion—accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption—plot perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World."

"Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe — a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic — and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment."

"If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular."

"By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions — some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization — simply fail to exist in the first place."

"If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style."

"We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape."

"The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills."

"If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo — but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical — then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed."

"This is crunch time for the whole human species, and not just for us but for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. This is the hour before the final exam and we're trying to get as much studying done as possible. It may be that you can't make yourself feel that for a decade or thirty years or however long this crunch time lasts, but the reality is one thing and the emotions are another... If you confront it full on, then you can't really justify trading off any part of intergalactic civilization for any intrinsic thing you could get nowadays, and at the same time, it's also true that there are very few people who can live like that (and I'm not one of them myself)."

"If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you've got to work to a pretty precise standard."

"Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?"

"Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use."

"Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us."

"Maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances."

"Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at "capitalism" because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word."

"I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified."

"There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it."

"There was a conference one time on: "What are we going to do about the looming risk of AI disaster?" … And what came out of that conference was OpenAI, which was basically the worst possible way of doing anything. Like, "This is not a problem of, 'Oh no, what if secret elites get AI', it's that nobody knows how to build the thing." … So, like, "Let's open up everything! Let's accelerate everything!" It was like ChatGPT's blind version of throwing the ideals at a place where they were exactly the wrong ideals to solve the problem. … And that was it. That was me in 2015 going, "Oh. So this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here, at the very end." So that is when I did my crying late at night, and then picked myself up and fought and fought and fought until I had run out all the avenues that I seem to have the capability to do."

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

"And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!"

"Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies."

"Many boys and girls are heroes in their dreams," Dumbledore said quietly. He did not look at any of the other girls, only at her. "Fewer in the waking world. Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them. It is a hard life, sometimes lonely, often short. I have told none to refuse that calling, but neither would I wish to increase their number."

"When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing."

"I'm often asked why I make such a "big deal" about choosing conservative Christians, Messianic Jews, or Orthodox Jews for neighbors. The plain truth is that in a societal collapse there will be a veritable vacuum of law enforcement. In such times, with a few exceptions, it will only be the God fearing that will continue to be law abiding. Choose your neighborhood wisely."

"The three most important things to look for when searching for a church home are doctrine, doctrine, and doctrine. If your main criteria are 'programs' and 'outreach' to this or that niche group, then in my opinion you are starting your search the wrong way."

"Mary Gray: It's in our fallen, sinful nature for tyrants to rise up in every nation. And unfortunately, it's also in our nature that the vast majority in every nation is either too stupid or too apathetic to do anything about it until the tyrants have put up their barbed wire and spilled a lot of blood."

"With a few exceptions, lower population [density] means fewer problems [for survivalist retreats]. When the Schumer Hits the Fan, there will be a mass exodus from the cities. Think of it as an army that is spreading out across a battlefield: The wider they are spread, the less effective they are. The inverse-square law hasn’t been repealed."

"The modern world [of survivalism] is full of pundits, poseurs, and Mall Ninjas. Preparedness is not just about accumulating a pile of stuff. You need practical skills, and those come only with study, training, and practice. Any armchair survivalist with a credit card can buy a set of stylish camouflage fatigues and an “M4gery” carbine encrusted with umpteen accessories. Style points should not be mistaken for genuine skills and practicality."

"My father often told me, “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” I urge readers to use less than lethal means when safe and practicable, but at times there is not a satisfactory substitute for well-aimed lead going down range at high velocity."

"The foundational morality of the civilized world is best summarized in the Ten Commandments. Moral relativism and secular humanism are slippery slopes. The terminal moraine at the base of these slopes is a rubble pile consisting of either despotism and pillage, or anarchy and the depths of depravity. I believe that it takes both faith and friends to survive perilous times."

"Tangibles trump conceptuals. Modern fiat currencies are generally accepted, but have essentially no backing. Because they are largely a by-product of interest-bearing debt, modern currencies are destined for inflation. In the long run, inflation dooms fiat currencies to collapse. The majority of your assets should be invested in productive farmland and other tangibles such as useful hand tools. After you have your key logistics squared away, anything extra should be invested in silver and gold."

"Governments tend to expand their power to the point that they do harm. In SurvivalBlog, I often warn of the insidious tyranny of the Nanny State... ...If the state where you live becomes oppressive, then don’t hesitate to relocate. Vote with your feet!"

"Owning a gun doesn’t make someone a “shooter” any more than owning a surfboard makes someone a surfer."

"As a Christian, I feel morally obligated to assist others who are less fortunate. Following the Old Testament laws of tzedakah (charity and tithing), I believe that my responsibility begins with my immediate family and expands in successive rings to supporting my immediate neighborhood and church, to my community, and beyond, as resources allow. My philosophy is to give until it hurts in times of disaster."

"There is no substitute for mass. Mass stops bullets. Mass stops gamma radiation. Mass stops (or at least slows down) bad guys from entering a home and depriving its residents of life and property. Sandbags are cheap, so buy plenty of them. When planning your retreat house, think: medieval castle."

"Some things are worth fighting for. I encourage my readers to avoid trouble, most importantly via relocation to safe areas where trouble is unlikely to visit. But there may come an unavoidable day when you have to make a stand to defend your own family or your neighbors. Furthermore, if you value your liberty, then be prepared to fight for it, both for yourself and for the sake of your progeny."

"Modern military planners often talk in terms of “threat spirals” when a given threat escalates and inspires a defensive countermeasure. Ideally you should anticipate your opponent’s next escalation and take countermeasures, insulating yourself from the future threat."

"If you are serious about preparedness, then it is time to get out of your armchair and start training and preparing. It will take time. It will take some sweat. It will take money. But once you’ve prepared, you can sleep well, knowing that you’ve done your best to protect and provide for your family, regardless of what the future brings. Don’t get stuck in the rut of simply *studying* preparedness. Unless the shelves in your pantry and garage are filling with supplies, and unless you are growing muscles and calluses, you are not preparing."

"It is one of the great ironies of our modern 'civilized' era that in most of the places where you don't feel the need to carry a firearm for self defense you can legally do so if you choose. But in most of places where you do indeed justifiably feel the immediate need to carry a gun, they are banned."

"Whenever someone must buy a license or pay a fee to exercise a right, then it is something less than a right. It is in fact a mere privilege, subject to the whim of petty bureaucrats. Fundamental rights are not abstract tokens that are given or sold by other men. They are in fact primary liberties bestowed upon us by God, our maker. Rights are not substantially secured by asking, "Mother may I?" of any government agency. Rights are more properly demanded or boldly seized and then conspicuously exercised regularly. This secures the liberties that have legitimately belonged to us since birth. If need be, lost rights can and must be restored through proscriptive use. If you live in a land where your rights have been marginalized into privileges, then it is either time to change your government, or to change your address. Much like a muscle that atrophies with disuse, any right that goes unexercised for many years devolves into a privilege, and eventually can even be redefined as a crime."

"A recurring theme in western journalism, academia, and collectivist politics is the quaint notion that firearms are intrinsically evil. That is, that they have a will of their own, that somehow inspires their owners to murder and mayhem. I liken this nonsensical belief to voodoo."

"Cartridge firearms are compact vehicles for change that have shaped modern history. The righteousness of their use is entirely up to their users, since like any other tool they can be used both for good or for ill. A firearm is just a tool with no volition. A rifle is no different than a claw hammer. To wit: A hammer can be used to build a house, or it can be used to bash in someone’s skull—the choice of uses is entirely up to the owner. A bulldozer can be used to build roads, or to destroy houses. A rifle can be used to drill holes in paper targets, or to dispatch a marauding bear, or to murder your fellow man. Again, the choice of uses is entirely up to the user."

"If a firearm is used by a criminal or psychopath with evil intentions, then it is a tool for evil. But if it is used for good (to defend life and property), then it is a tool for good. A firearm by itself has no sentience, no volition, no moral force, and no politics. The proper term for this is an adiaphorous object--something that is neither good nor evil. A firearm is simply a cleverly-designed construction of metal, wood, and plastic in the form of a precision tool."

"Here it is, in quintessence: You are either a man with a gun, or you are mere human cattle for the slaughter. The choice is yours. I prefer to be armed and vigilant rather than being at the mercy of some would-be slave master. There is no notch in my ear."

"Guns are like parachutes: if you don’t have one when you need it, then chances are that you won’t ever be in need of one again."

"The Second Amendment is about protecting your right to go deer hunting the same way that the First Amendment is about protecting your right to publish poetry."

"People should be judged as individuals. Anyone that makes blanket statements about other races is ignorant that there are both good and bad individuals in all groups. I have accepted The Great Commission with sincerity. "Go forth into all nations" means exactly that: all nations."

"The truth is that people should be judged as individuals. (That is one of my core Precepts.) Anyone that makes blanket statements about other races is ignorant that there are both good and bad individuals in all groups. There is no inherent superiority in any skin tone or facial feature, any more than there is in any particular hair color."

"As an Army officer, I learned that in order to be effective, an army must have three key abilities: To move, shoot, and communicate. Take away any one, and you are ineffective. But if you get all three right, you can absolutely devastate an opponent—even one that has vastly superior numbers. ... Just buying up modern-day slaves and giving them their freedom hasn't worked. The Islamic slavers simply go and kidnap more of them. The only way to effectively stop armed slaver kidnappers is to train and equip large numbers of armed free men in the border villages. In the modern context, you can "Just Say No" to slavery only with a battle rifle."

"In the past decade the distinction between connotation and denotation has been blurred by politics. The definitions of words should not change with every shift in the winds of public sentiment. Our society has already suffered from four decades of Situational Ethics. Heaven help us in this new era of Situational Definitions. A rocket scientist or military engineer can teach you about Sympathetic Detonations, but it is 21st Century television commentators who have introduced us to the era of Sympathetic Denotations. We now live in an Orwellian world where a semi-auto rifle is arbitrarily called an "assault rifle" if it has black plastic furniture, where a standard capacity magazine is called a "high capacity" magazine, where the confiscation and redistribution of wealth is dubbed "fairness." This also a new age when folks who are given free health care, HD televisions, free cell phones, and enough money to be able to afford air conditioning are deemed to be "living in poverty." The fluidity of our language is evidence that America is sliding into oblivion. Hold fast to the true meaning of words and phrases, or we are doomed."

"We must recognize that in our generation there might come a day with no remaining avenue of escape. State laws can be avoiding simply by moving, but what of unconstitutional Federal laws? At that point we will have no choice but to rebel against tyranny. (Since the alternative would be to live as little better than bleating sheep.) When we reach that juncture I doubt that I will advocate expatriation. Most foreign lands have less freedom than we enjoy here in these United States. I don't think that I will find some ideal "bolt hole" nation with more firearms freedom, better banking privacy, a more positive business climate, lower taxes, full religious freedom, unimpeded personal property rights, fair courts, and assured freedom of speech. If I must die, then I will do so here in America, fully armed and facing my oppressors. I won't die in some ditch, begging for mercy."

"Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?"

"Any future which is not beautiful is unacceptable."

"No future can be beautiful which involves an economy that violates the rights of future generations, that degrades fundamental planetary systems in any way, or that fails to offer every human being a basic share of safety, dignity and happiness."

"The future starts now."

"Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience."

"We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. … Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible."

"We have to develop a model of prosperity that 4.5 billion more people can share and we don't know how to do it."

"To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs."

"Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems."

"My other car is a bright green city."

"The answer to the problem of the American car is not under its hood. ...The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car but to eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go."

"Getting a good education and making good grades no longer ensures success, and nobody seems to have noticed, except our children."

"“Today, the most dangerous advice you can give a child is ‘Go to school, get good grades and look for a safe secure job,’ ” he likes to say. “That is old advice, and it’s bad advice. If you could see what is happening in Asia, Europe, South America, you would be as concerned as I am.”"

"It’s bad advice, he believes, “because if you want your child to have a financially secure future, they can’t play by the old set of rules. It’s just too risky.”"

"Education is the foundation of success[...]"

"Remember that financial intelligence is the mental process via which we solve our financial problems."

"As a process, choosing for myself turned out to be much more valuable in the long run, rather than simply accepting or rejecting a single point of view."

"“I can’t afford it.” The other dad forbade those words to be used. He insisted I say, “How can I afford it?” One is a statement, and the other is a question."

"[...]proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth."

"“The reason I must be rich is because I have you kids.”"

"“There is a difference between being poor and being broke. Broke is temporary, and poor is eternal.”"

"If you can’t make up you mind decisively, then you’ll never learn to make money anyway."

"“But that is not how life teaches you, and I would say that life is the best teacher of all. Most of the time, life does not talk to you. It just sort of pushes you around. Each push is life saying, ‘Wake up. There’s something I want you to learn.’ ”"

"“If you learn life’s lessons, you will do well. If not, life will just continue to push you around. People do two things. Some just let life push them around. Others get angry and push back. But they push back against their boss, or their job, or their husband or wife. They do not know it’s life that’s pushing.”"

"“Life pushes all of us around. Some give up. Others fight. A few learn the lesson and move on. They welcome life pushing them around. To these few people, it means they need and want to learn something. They learn and move on. Most quit, and a few like you fight.”"

"Most people want everyone else in the world to change but themselves."

"Let me tell you, it’s easier to change yourself than everyone else.”"

"“The poor and the middle class work for money.” “The rich have money work for them.”"

"You see, true learning takes energy, passion, a burning desire."

"When it comes to money, most people want to play it safe and feel secure. So passion does not direct them. Fear does.”"

"“Simply because it’s easier to learn to work for money, especially if fear is your primary emotion when the subject of money is discussed.”"

"Most people never see the trap they are in."

"“Most people have a price. And they have a price because of human emotions named fear and greed."

"[...]they feel the fear of not having money. Instead of confronting the fear, they react instead of think."

"Money is running their lives, and they refuse to tell the truth about that. Money is in control of their emotions and hence their souls.”"

"“I’ve met so many people who say, ‘Oh, I’m not interested in money.’ Yet they’ll work at a job for eight hours a day. That’s a denial of truth. If they weren’t interested in money, then why are they working?"

"‘Will a job be the best solution to this fear over the long run?’ In my opinion, the answer is ‘no.’"

"An education and a job are important. But it won’t handle the fear."

"“The main cause of poverty or financial struggle is fear and ignorance, not the economy or the government or the rich. It’s self-inflicted fear and ignorance that keeps people trapped."

"[...]a person stops searching for information and knowledge of one’s self, ignorance sets in."

"Please don’t let money run your life."

"Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions."

"Choosing what we think rather than reacting to our emotions."

"‘Is working harder at this the best solution to this problem?’"

"A job is only a short-term solution to a long-term problem."

"Keep working boys, but the sooner you forget about needing a paycheck, the easier your adult life will be."

"Keep using your brain, work for free, and soon your mind will show you ways of making money far beyond what I could ever pay you."

"You will see things that other people never see."

"Intelligence solves problems and produces money. Money without financial intelligence is money soon gone."

"If you want to be rich, you need to be financially literate."

"If you are going to build the Empire State Building, the first thing you need to do is dig a deep hole and pour a strong foundation. If you are going to build a home in the suburbs, all you need to do is pour a 6-inch slab of concrete. Most people, in their drive to get rich, are trying to build an Empire State Building on a 6-inch slab."

"Illiteracy, both in words and numbers, is the foundation of financial struggle."

"Money often puts a spotlight on what we do not know."

"A fool and his money is one big party."

"They know that professional success is no longer solely linked to academic success, as it once was."

"A person can be highly educated, professionally successful and financially illiterate."

"More money seldom solves someone’s money problems. Intelligence solves problems."

"The poor and middle class all too often allow the power of money to control them. By simply getting up and working harder, failing to ask themselves if what they do makes sense, they shoot themselves in the foot as they leave for work every morning. By not fully understanding money, the vast majority of people allow the awesome power of money to control them. The power of money is used against them."

"The fear of being different prevents most people from seeking new ways to solve their problems."

"When we were told to follow set procedures and not deviate from the rules, we could see how this schooling process actually discouraged creativity."

"And when it comes to money, high emotions tend to lower financial intelligence."

"A problem with school is that you often become what you study."

"Life is sometimes tough when you do not fit the “standard” profile."

"My real estate strategy, on the other hand, is to start small and keep trading the properties up for bigger properties and, therefore, delaying paying taxes on the gain. This allows the value to increase dramatically. I generally hold real estate less than seven years."

"The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood and children’s inheritance."

"If you know what you’re talking about, you have a fighting chance."

"When someone sues a wealthy individual they are often met with layers of legal protection, and often find that the wealthy person actually owns nothing. They control everything, but own nothing."

"We all have tremendous potential, and we all are blessed with gifts. Yet, the one thing that holds all of us back is some degree of self-doubt. It is not so much the lack of technical information that holds us back, but more the lack of self-confidence. Some are more affected than others."

"Often in the real world, it’s not the smart that get ahead but the bold."

"The people who get out of the “Rat Race” in the game the quickest are the people who understand numbers and have creative financial minds."

"Limiting your options is the same as hanging on to old ideas."

"That is financial intelligence. It is not so much what happens, but how many different financial solutions you can think of to turn a lemon into millions. It is how creative you are in solving financial problems."

"I’d rather welcome change than cling to the past."

"The idea in anything is to use your technical knowledge, wisdom and love of the game to cut the odds down, to lower the risk."

"Failure is part of the process of success."

"People who avoid failure also avoid success."

"You see with your mind what others miss with their eyes."

"In other words, a majority of people let their lack of money stop them from making a deal."

"Investing is not buying. It’s more a case of knowing."

"It is what you do not know that is your greatest risk."

"There is always risk, so learn to manage risk instead of avoid it."

"In my attempt to be helpful, I found myself defending my suggestion."

"“I am a terrible writer. You are a great writer. I went to sales school. You have a master’s degree. Put them together and you get a best-selling author’ and a ‘best-writing author.’ ”"

"The world is filled with smart, talented, educated and gifted people. We meet them every day. They are all around us."

"The sad truth is, great talent is not enough."

"[...]financial intelligence is a synergy of accounting, investing, marketing and law."

"When it comes to money, the only skill most people know is to work hard."

"[...]schools reward people who study more and more about less and less."

"Job is an acronym for ‘Just Over Broke.’"

"When I ask the classes I teach, “How many of you can cook a better hamburger than McDonald’s?” almost all the students raise their hands. I then ask, “So if most of you can cook a better hamburger, how come McDonald’s makes more money than you?” The answer is obvious: McDonald’s is excellent at business systems. The reason so many talented people are poor is because they focus on building a better hamburger and know little to nothing about business systems."

"The world is filled with talented poor people."

"All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know but because of what they do not know."

"And in all my years, I have never met a rich person who has never lost money. But I have met a lot of poor people who have never lost a dime…investing, that is."

"The fear of losing money is real. Everyone has it. Even the rich. But it’s not fear that is the problem. It’s how you handle fear. It’s how you handle losing. It’s how you handle failure that makes the difference in one’s life. That goes for anything in life, not just money. The primary difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they handle that fear."

"“It’s a Texan’s attitude toward risk, reward and failure I’m talking about. It’s how they handle life. They live it big."

"“Winning means being unafraid to lose.”"

"[...]take a loss and make it a win."

"Texans don’t bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is the formula for all winners."

"I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity."

"Failure inspires winners."

"The greatest secret of winners is that failure inspires winning."

"There is a big difference between hating losing and being afraid to lose."

"If you have little money and you want to be rich, you must first be “focused,” not “balanced.”"

"If you look at anyone successful, at the start they were not balanced. Balanced people go nowhere. They stay in one spot. To make progress, you must first go unbalanced. Just look at how you make progress walking. Thomas Edison was not balanced. He was focused. Bill Gates was not balanced. He was focused. Donald Trump is focused. George Soros is focused. George Patton did not take his tanks wide. He focused them and blew through the weak spots in the German line. The French went wide with the Maginot Line, and you know what happened to them. If you have any desire of being rich, you must focus."

"Doubt is expensive."

"As I said, getting out of the rat race is technically easy. It doesn’t take much education, but those doubts are cripplers for most people."

"Cynics criticize, and winners analyze"

"How can I afford to never work again?"

"Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”"

"I have found that many people use arrogance to try to hide their own ignorance."

"It’s just like riding a bike. After a little wobbling, it’s a piece of cake. But when it comes to money, it’s the determination to get through the wobbling that’s a personal thing."

"I do it for myself and the people I love. It’s love that gets me over the hurdles and sacrifices."

"The net result: I still have the old way I used to think, and I have Peter’s[Lynch] way of looking at the same problem or situation."

"A truly intelligent person welcomes new ideas, for new ideas can add to the synergy of other accumulated ideas."

"Listening is more important than talking."

"I would say that one of the hardest things about wealth building is to be true to yourself and be willing to not go along with the crowd."

"The power of self-discipline. If you cannot get control of yourself, do not try to get rich."

"So I pay myself first, invest the money, and let the creditors yell."

"I know that sounds tough, but as I said, if you’re not tough inside, the world will always push you around anyway."

"True, I have lost money on many occasions. But I only play with money I can afford to lose."

"For while the process of developing cash flow from an asset column in theory is easy, it is the mental fortitude of directing money that is hard."

"Due to external temptations, it is much easier in today’s consumer world to simply blow it out the expense column."

"Too often today, we focus to borrowing money to get the things we want instead of focusing on creating money."

"To be the master of money, you need to be smarter than it. Then money will do as it is told. It will obey you. Instead of being a slave to it, you will be the master of it. That is financial intelligence."

"Copying or emulating heroes is true power learning."

"Poor people are more greedy than rich people"

"It is true that your world is only a mirror of you."

"All you need to be is generous with what you have, and the powers will be generous with you."

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result."

"Most sellers ask too much."

"Moral of the story: Make offers."

"Finding a good deal, the right business, the right people, the right investors, or whatever is just like dating. You must go to the market and talk to a lot of people, make a lot of offers, counteroffers, negotiate, reject and accept."

"I told him that his profit is made when you buy, not when you sell."

"Small thinkers don’t get the big breaks. If you want to get richer, think bigger first."

"Action always beats inaction."

"Today, we need greater financial intelligence to simply survive."

"Education and wisdom about money are important. Start early. Buy a book. Go to a seminar. Practice. Start small."

"It’s what is in your head that determines what is in your hands. Money is only an idea."

"Today, don’t play it safe, play it smart."

"You can only learn so much by reading. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book."

"It isn't always easy to act on what's in your head instead of what's in your heart. And it isn't always right to. The whole trick to knowing what to do is deciding when to make yourself listen to your head, and when it's okay to just follow your feelings."

"Still, all this time, I was only barely aware that my subconscious was putting together a layout of the house. It wasn't that I expected to need one, it's just how my mind works. I am, quite frankly, very good at it, and maybe that's where the real pleasure comes in — just the joy of doing something you do well. There are worse reasons for doing things; maybe there aren't any better ones."

"When there's nothing you can do except worry, that's a good time to worry."

"I will always hold to those principles by which I have been raised… To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity… To hold myself to higher standards of conduct than I hold another. To never strike without cause, and, when there is cause, to strike for the heart..."

"A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless."

"Why do you work so hard to make yourself disliked? I should think you'd find it happens enough on its own without putting yourself to any extra trouble."

"A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be."

"Stalin is the perfect example of what I was talking about. To simply call him corrupt tells us nothing useful. What circumstances put him into power? What objective pressures, as well as subjective characteristics, led him to make the decisions he made? I'm currently reading Trotsky's writings from 1932 (scary how accurately he predicts the way WWII would play out), and analyzing the details of why Stalin did as he did is far more complex and useful than just, 'power corrupts'. And it is even more true for the other great dictators of the 20th Century: I don’t think you can even say that Hitler and Mussolini were corrupt: they came to power in order to do the very things they did."

"Ursula Le Guin has been a hero of mine for 20 years. She's done so much, and she will continue to do good even though she's gone. I honestly don't know what I would have become if it weren't for Ursula Le Guin. The first time I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" I realized how balance could be even more epic than war. Suddenly, Fantasy wasn't just wish fulfillment and grandeur, it was real and complex."

"If you were a crayon, what color would you most like to make out with?"

"We often just accept the things that we like and complain a lot about the things that we don't like. But if we could, like, intensely dwell on the really great things in life the way we intensely dwell on the negative things in life. I think that would be fantastic."

"I like three-legged dogs, because if I was missing a leg I would be like: „URGH, life sucks when missing a leg. Slow down! I can't walk that fast, I'm missing a freaking leg!!“ And dogs? No! A three legged dog is on it. Exactly the same amount of happy as a four-legged dog! That's why I like three-legged dogs. They have taken their three-leggedness and they embrace it."

"It's almost as if our society values opinion more than it values knowledge."

"So you go on and on, with this intellectual fly down, your underwear exposed, and toilette paper hanging out the back of your pants."

"But the truth of the matter is, to live a good life, as a good person, it doesn't matter how you got there. It just matters that you do."

"What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?"

"Why is it called Piggie-back riding? I'm not a piggie!"

"I think it's pretty ridiculous to sit back and think that we've changed the horse so much, without realizing that they have changed us an awful lot too."

"The way that we look does not have anything to do with the way that we sound, or the way that we are."

"So the president is like, "Well, once upon a time it was Congress's job to decide whether or not we attacked countries, so let's let them decide." Which is funny, because, as we all know, if Congress were on fire, Congress could not pass the "Pour Water on Congress Act"."

"We've got to keep 6 billion people happy without destroying our planet. It's the biggest challenge we've ever faced....but we're taking it on."

"Hank: "If you just say enough things, some of them will end up on those quote websites." // John: "Which, of course, is the point of being a person.""

"I thought what would I give, if it could be true If I could ever feel again the way I felt when I read you"

"It seems no matter what I read I think "this is not harry potter.""

"I forgot how to throw a boomerang, but then it came back to me."

"For years this rule has kept me out of hopeless despair: You simply do not feel what is always there. I ask my brain to entertain that pain is the same, that if I feel it all the time, can you really call it pain?"

"Wooh green-screen ponies!"

"Certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much). Coulter could be the poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party. And in some ways I could be the poster woman for the opposite. I consider myself a progressive Republican, but here is what I don’t get about Coulter: Is she for real or not? Are some of her statements just gimmicks to gain publicity for her books or does she actually believe the things she says? Does she really believe all Jewish people should be “perfected” and become Christians? And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate? (I asked Ann for comment on this column, including many of the above questions, but she did not answer my request.)"

"McCain has earned herself a remarkable bit of controversy in the relatively short period of time that she's emerged as a pundit, picking fights with the likes of Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and...well, a huge chunk of the Republican Party."

""That's the way it is" is unacceptable. If I'd accepted that mentality I'd never be where I am today. Expect something better. Fight for it.*"

"Life is full of disappointments. And by "disappointments" I mean "people.""

"A “trusted leader in our small business community and a relentless advocate who approaches advocacy with a resilient spirit and a smile for all” - Senator Michael Gianaris"

"Crews is one of the most sharp, charming, and heartfelt comedic storytellers working in NYC."

"One day that same year, I told my dad that someday, I would sail around the world alone."

"Fewer people have successfully solo-circumnavigated the globe than have journeyed into space."

"All the ingenuity, all the high-tech gear, all the jury-rigging—sometimes the sea would rip it all away until there was only you, the Creator, and His mercy."

"I wanted to break the record, of course, and become the youngest person to sail around the world solo and unassisted."

"On October 19, 2009, my sixteenth birthday, Wild Eyes officially became mine! Now it was really happening."

"The critics barged in to harp on every decision we made. . .Sadly, I began to doubt myself. Maybe I was too young. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough sailor."

"After the week of stormy weather, she set sail under sunny skies, on a glassy sea with a big swell running."

"Being at sea is like watching the whole world in high-definition."

"It seems like people my age are over-protected today, even to the point where a lot of parents refuse to put their kids in the position to make important decisions, to aspire to great things, because they don’t want to put them in a position to fail."

"I was so thankful that my parents trusted me enough and had enough faith in my abilities to let me follow my passion and try to do something great, even if I might fail."

"But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China."

"I saw the loose tiller jolt hard to the side as the boat began to spin."

"I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth."

"The winds were blowing from west to east, pushing Abby’s boat toward the rocks as Abby struggled with the autopilots below. If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces."

"When a sailor overcomes crushing adversity, there’s a massive sense of accomplishment."

"Terror ripped through me as I was falling, falling, falling toward the sea."

"If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better."

"Slowly, my brain let me in on the fact that I had just come this close to dying."

"Going up the mast is one of the most dangerous things you can do as a solo sailor."

"The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable."

"But the more times she missed, the faster she’d be traveling when she finally slammed into the mast. And it wasn’t if she hit the mast; it was when. At that point, Abby would be either severely injured or dead."

"The swells were amazing! As big as three-story apartment buildings!"

"It was dark. Something had fallen on top of the cabin light, turning the cabin into a black tunnel. I couldn’t hear anything at all. The roll didn’t stop. It continued to port, and for just a few seconds I was sitting on the ceiling in the dark."

"Even without looking I knew: there was no way I still had a mast. And without a mast, the trip was over."

"Fifty feet of mast lay in the heaving water, downed lines and shrouds holding it there."

"I knew that even if I was able to call for help, I was in a place so remote that it wasn’t likely there would be anyone who could help me. And even if there were, it could take weeks."

"The seriousness of my situation started to sink in, and again I fought panic. I pushed it down, but it was harder this time, like my insides were an open can of shaken soda and I was trying to keep it from bubbling up out of the top."

"In that moment it dawned on me that everything has to line up perfectly for something to turn out this awful."

"It was like a horrible movie clip, only worse, because I could feel it—not just see it."

"Marianne tried to stay hopeful. But slowly her imagination bulldozed her optimism aside and pushed her mind into a dark place. There, she saw Abby tethered to the boat in her bright red foul-weather gear, being dragged along dead in the sea."

"The only thing I knew to do was to pray. “Lord, if I’m going to be rescued,” I said out loud, “please let me know.”"

"Against reason, I thought that the next swell would be it: another rogue wave would roll me again . . .At that moment, a noise from above caught my attention. And I looked up just in time to see a gigantic white airplane fly by."

"When I saw the plane, I was absolutely astonished! Two emotions crashed over me: surging joy and crazy fear."

"The things that happen on the sea take you beyond yourself, beyond human capability."

"Just like that, a single phone call erased one possible, horrendous future—and replaced it with the bright certainty that God had answered the prayers of thousands and that their beloved Abby was coming home."

"Unable to make radio contact with this second plane I felt my chances were fading fast. Dropping the radio mic, I sprinted up to the deck . . . and saw a huge ship bearing down on me!"

"Just as I was about to grab the rope ladder, a huge swell lifted the dinghy nearly to La Reunion’s deck level, and at least a dozen smiling French fishermen pulled me aboard."

"I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again."

"I am twelve thousand miles wiser, twelve thousand miles more resilient, and I have twelve thousand miles more faith in God."

"I will definitely attempt to sail around the world again. In fact, I can’t wait for the chance to try again."

"I'm looking to avoid a subtly demeaning subtext which holds that reading, say, is something you should do--like flossing or taxes or laundry. I don't want to speak for women writers, but I recoil at the idea of someone reading my book because they really should read a black author or two. I don't want to be an icebreaker at your corporation's Kwanzaa gathering."

"[M]y goal is to get kids to own their education. I don't think I can hector them into doing this. I don't think I can shame them into doing it. I do think that I might be able to affect some sort of internal motivation. So I try to get them to see that every subject they study has the potential to open up a universe. I really mean this."

"Weakness, misery, does not always elicit sympathy. Perhaps that is because the weakness reminds of what we we fear for ourselves. Or perhaps it reminds us of our own complicity in some broad crime, and more, our presumed helplessness for it to be any other way."

"No other athlete in a major sport gives so much of his body and gets so little in return than the average player on a NFL team."

"Mr. [Clyde] Ross at that time, like most African Americans around the country, was unable to secure a loan, due to policies around redlining and deciding, you know, who deserved the loans and who doesn’t. There was a broad, broad consensus that African Americans, for no other reason besides blanket racism, could not be responsible homeowners."

"When people wanted to criticize the Affordable Care Act they would often say “This is reparations. This is reparations.” Liberals [were often saying (somewhat indistinct)] “No, no, no. This isn’t for black people. This will benefit everybody.” In a just world we would say “Yes. This does disproportionately benefit black people and that’s a very, very good thing because for most of our history we have disproportionately injured black people and our policy should be structured in such a way that take that into account."

"You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery."

"Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us."

"When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community."

"[James Baldwin is] probably the biggest influence on me from a literary perspective."

"Racism isn’t just morally wrong, it makes for poor story-telling."

"Sometimes the moral course lies within the politically possible, and sometimes the moral course lies outside of the politically possible. One of the great functions of radical candidates is to war against equivocators and opportunists who conflate these two things. Radicals expand the political imagination and, hopefully, prevent incrementalism from becoming a virtue."

"There was the normal high that comes from the hormones of youth, that fresh sense of being unchained. But also there was the omnipresent feeling that It could go down. In those moments—which back then were all of our moments—your neurology was always code red."

"I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree."

"My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot."

"In , Dad found a literature of himself. He'd read ' and ', but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain."

"That was how I came to understand, how I came to know why all these brothers wrote and talked so big. Even the Knowledged feared the streets. But the rhyme pad was a spell book—it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I knew what Fruitie was trying to say, that when under the aegis of , you never lived alone, you never walked alone."

"Our folks understood that there was a war upon us and that school was a weapon that outdid any Glock. Yet the whole process—with its equally spaced desks, precisely timed periods and lectures, with its standardized pencils and tests—felt unnatural to me. But much as I hated their terms, having been impressed into them, I hated more the failing. So I was left with a great unconscious sadness, an emptiness which, even when I was alone, I was not fully aware. But it worked on me like an invisible weight, altered my laughter, posture, my approach to girls. Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up."

"Nowadays, I cut on the tube and see the dumbfounded looks, when over some minor violation of name and respect, a black boy is found leaking on the street. The anchors shake their heads. The activists give their stupid speeches, praising mythical days when all disputes were handled down at Ray's Gym. Politicians step up to the mic, claim the young have gone mad, their brains infected, and turned superpredator. Fuck you all who've ever spoken so foolishly, who've opened your mouths like we don't know what this is. We have read the books you own, the scorecards you keep—done the math and emerged prophetic. We know how we will die—with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us."

"I built not by parental edict, not under threat, but because of my own native yearning. This was a giant step toward seeing more. Across the country our elders were battling the shades that shrank our minds and abbreviated our world. We thought the corner was cool, but more than that we deeply believed that we could do no better, that this tiny parcel was all we deserved in this world of sin."

"[In the mid-90s] The older gods were falling off. were breaking. had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight."

"The elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies."

"Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because ... America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist."

"One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard."

"[T]he police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs forth from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible."

"Any claim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable."

"I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free."

"I've never felt the pride that is supposed to come with righteous self-defense and justified violence. Whenever it was me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication."

"I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline."

"Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves."

"It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump's predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit."

"Any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this "working class" supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments [in the New Yorker] the fact that "Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway," he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness."

"Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase "grab 'em by the pussy" into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, "If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.""

"Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible... This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties... But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach."

"As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement, quote, “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics” of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves. By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America—$3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined. The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling nor persuasion, but torture, rape and child trafficking. Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—to all, regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so, for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell. It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement. But the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy, respects no such borders, and the god of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs—coup d’états and convict leasing. vagrancy laws and debt peonage, redlining and racist GI bills, poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism."

"We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader. What they know, what this committee must know, is that while emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. And that is the thing about Senator McConnell’s “something.” It was 150 years ago. And it was right now. The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share."

"You know, the two great crimes in American history is obviously...the near destruction...of this country’s Native American population, the theft of their land, and on to work that land was brought in native Africans into this country, beginning in 1619. Those twin processes profoundly altered the shape of the world and made this country possible. Obviously, first of all, you know, the land on which America and Americans currently reside was the land of Native Americans, but the people brought in to break that land just transformed it."

"The profits derived from slavery are more extreme than I think are commonly acknowledged. As I said yesterday, in 1860, the combined worth of the 4 million enslaved black people in this country was some $3 billion, nearly $75 billion in today’s share of dollars. Cotton, in 1860, was this country’s largest export—not just its largest export, it was the majority of exports out of this country. So, from a financial perspective, just the economics of it, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine America without enslavement."

"The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders. Most of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. And the fact that they were presidents is not incidental to the fact that they—to their slaveholding. That was how they built their wealth. That was how Thomas Jefferson built his wealth. That was how George Washington built his wealth. Individual slaves were the equivalent of, say, owning a home today. They were people, but turned into objects of extreme wealth. So, just from the economic perspective, there’s that."

"The average African-American family in this country making $100,000, which is, you know, decent money, actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things."

"If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans. There are people well within the living memory of this country that are still suffering from the after-effects of that."

"This whole thing about who should get a check, and should we cut checks, you know, I understand those questions. That’s great. Those people should support H.R. 40, though, because that’s what H.R. 40 does. It tries to get that figured out, and get that math figured out, and figure out the best way to do it. But if we don’t actually have a study, we can’t actually answer those questions. You can’t ask a doctor to make a diagnosis before there’s an actual examination."

"And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone."

"Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty."

"So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft."

"And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about."

"Mitch McConnell... does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people."

"I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country, however one might feel about that. If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally injust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid."

"Joe Biden shouldn’t be president. You know? You know, obviously, I don’t think I’m breaking any news here. You know, if he ends up being the nominee, better him than Trump, but I think that’s a really, really low standard."

"I think when you have somebody who is celebrating their relationship, the ability of a person who saw no problem depriving an entire population of African Americans in their state of the right to vote, the right to participate as American citizens, the fact that that person was polite to them?... And so, I don’t know what is going on in your brain where you decide to celebrate the fact these people were polite."

"You know, Joe Biden says that he’s been involved with civil rights his entire career. It’s worth remembering Joe Biden opposed busing and bragged about it, you know, in the 1970s. Joe Biden is on the record as being to the right of actually the New Democrats in the 1990s on the issue of mass incarceration, wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails. And so, you know, I’m not surprised. I mean, this is who Joe Biden is."

"A large portion of this country... want to see somebody who can beat Trump. I get that. And there is, you know, a feeling, I think, among certain people that Joe Biden can out-white-man Donald Trump.... I get that beating Donald Trump is extremely, externally important. I get that. But I just hope that that’s the floor and not the ceiling."

"Well, I think I should say before I say that, my understanding is that Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40. I think that’s where we are now. So I’m obviously pretty pleased about that."

"I think all of the things that Bernie Sanders... listed about paying attention to distressed communities should be done. And we should also have reparations. So, I don’t see those two things as in conflict. It’s not clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda. In fact, it was never clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda, why one can’t associate themselves with the massive gaps in the wealth, that don’t just exist in the African-American community, but exist in communities across the country, and at the same time recognize that there’s something specific about the gap in the African-American community that’s tied to the specificity of American history. But, you know, as I said, I’m happy Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40."

"We feared [Ryland's Hounds] and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake. (p. 57)"

"[A white person] was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave."

"Ta-Nehisi is speaking to us from Washington, D.C., where he testified yesterday, and he’s speaking in front of an image of the Capitol, which was built by enslaved people. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer-in-residence at New York University, author of a number of books, including We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, that includes his “Case Against [sic] Reparations”—his “Case for Reparations.” We’ll be back with Ta-Nehisi in a minute."

"The rich world, for the most part, pretty much ignores these calls, dismissing it all as ancient history, much as the U.S. government manages to disregard calls for slavery reparations from African Americans (though in the spring of 2014, the calls grew distinctly louder, thanks to breakthrough reporting by The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, which once again rekindled the debate)."

"At this point, is the average person boarding a plane more fearful of Al Qaeda or TSA?"

"I read because I love the experience, because it is a powerful teacher of life, because it transforms me."

"Make it so easy you can't say no."

"Now think about every object you touch — your phone, a dish, a cup, a book, your laptop, your shirt. Imagine that each object were sacred, precious, a deeply valuable gift. Imagine that they were as valuable as your eyeballs. Now imagine treating this object with the kind of care and respect you'd treat your own eyeballs with. Would this change how you treat things?"

"We can create a fearless life by living daily out of our comfort zone, and in the deliciousness of uncertainty."

"[Yahoo!] found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse."

"So you can be a historian and also be an asshole."

"“Google is a library or archive like a supermarket is a food museum.”"

"Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Wikipedia articles should be written. Like wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders."

"Jason Scott is an arrogant, self-impressed idiot who thinks he's god's gift to techies because he remembers "the golden days" of BBS's."

"(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else."

"The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”"

"Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think - and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking - that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love." When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.""

"The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time. You can’t stop aging. Gene therapies and replacement organs and plastic surgery give it a good fight. But it catches up with you anyway. Get a new lung, and your heart blows a valve. Get a new heart, and your liver swells up to the size of an inflatable kiddie pool. Change out your liver, a stroke gives you a whack. That’s aging’s trump card; they still can’t replace brains."

"I had never seen so many old people in one place at one time. Neither had Harry. “It’s like Wednesday morning at the world’s biggest Denny’s,” he said."

"What’s the point of being in charge if you can’t indulge in pointless favoritism."

"The recruit was Sam McCain; in one of our lunch sessions I recalled Sarah O’Connell describing him as more mouth than brain. Unsurprisingly, he’d been in sales most of his life."

"In this universe, experience counts."

"I’m not sure I like their plan for converting us to their religion, seeing as it involves dying and all."

"“Obviously, the Rraey have some way to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where our ships are going to skip. How do they do that?” “I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to,” I said. “That’s exactly right. But they do anyway. So, quite obviously, our model of how skipping works is wrong. Theory gets thrown out the window when observation proves it isn’t so. The question now is what is really going on.”"

"“I’m not insane, sir,” I said. “I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”"

"“It’s Charlie’s soul,” he repeated. “Or more accurately, it’s a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin.”"

"Human technology was good, and weapon to weapon humans were as well-equipped as the vast majority of their adversaries. But the weapon that ultimately matters is the one behind the trigger."

"Those people you saw—the realborn—are born without a plan. They’re born because biology tells humans to make more humans; but it doesn’t consider what to do with them after that. Realborn go for years without the slightest clue what they’re going to do with themselves. From what I understand, some of them never actually figure it out. They just walk through life in a daze and then fall into their graves at the end of it. Sad. And inefficient."

"Rationality is not one of humanity’s strong points."

"Jared, allow me to share with you my philosophy of human beings. It can be summed up in four words: I like good people."

"“I didn’t say that,” Szilard said, in a tone that implied that perhaps he had."

"When power is within reach, few will wait patiently for it."

"No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair."

"That’s physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry."

"“Harry!” Boutin said. “Nice guy. Didn’t know he was that smart. He hid it well.”"

"You are sufficiently like me to officially be interesting."

"“Every creature has fear,” Jared said. “Even the non-conscious ones.” “No,” Boutin said. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it’s not the same thing. Fear isn’t the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential."

"Imagine if every species named itself after its greatest flaw. We could name our species arrogance."

"She was temptable—which, if you believe in an all-powerful God, means God intentionally put temptation into Eve. Which seems like a dirty trick, if you ask me."

"Harvey was not especially introspective, but this didn’t mean he was stupid. He was moral, within his lights; he understood the value of subtlety even if he wasn’t much for it himself, and one of the reasons he could get away with being loud and obnoxious was that he was a fair stick at strategy and logistics. Give him a job and he’d do it, usually in the most entropy-producing way possible, yes, but also in a way that achieved exactly the aim it was supposed to. One of Harvey’s guiding lights in terms of strategies was simplicity; all things being equal, Harvey preferred the course of action that let him get into the middle of things and then just buckle down. When asked about it, Harvey called it his Occam’s razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone’s ass was usually the correct one."

"“Speaking of secrets, how are your negotiations with the Obin going?” Both Mattson and Robbins looked at Szilard warily. “There are no negotiations with the Obin,” Robbins said. “Of course not,” Szilard said. “You’re not negotiating with the Obin to continue Boutin’s consciousness program for them. And the Obin are not negotiating with us to knock down whichever of the Rraey or Eneshans is still left standing after their upcoming little war. No one’s negotiating with anyone about anything. And how are these non-negotiations not going?” Robbins looked at Mattson, who nodded. “They’re not going surprisingly well,” Robbins said. “We probably won’t reach an agreement in the next couple of days.” “How not wonderful,” Szilard said."

"“You and I don’t actually need to be here for this,” I said to the goat. The goat didn’t respond, but I could tell she agreed with me."

"Some people are just no good at not being in charge."

"Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults."

"When you control communication, you can hide anything you want."

"“I don’t appreciate the suggestion that I’m acting irrationally,” he said. “Then don’t act irrationally,” Jane said, “because there will be consequences.”"

"Empires of conquest don’t last, Administrator Perry. They hollow out from within, from the greed of rulers and the endless appetite for war."

"“That’s a nice speech, Trujillo,” Rybicki said. “It doesn’t make it true.” “General, at the moment, I wouldn’t place you as an authority on truth.”"

"“Look,” I said. “Something that needs your attention. Over there. Away from here.”"

"“This is Major Perry’s house?” “I hope so,” I said. “All his stuff is here.”"

"When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed."

"Eight-year-olds can switch into acquisition mode pretty quickly."

"Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things."

"I guess I was just hoping there might be a way to do things other than the way that ends up with everyone getting killed."

"“I have drinks,” Hanson said, coming up behind Duvall. “Why, Jimmy,” Duvall said. “That makes you my new favorite person.”"

"Who are you and what medications aren’t you taking?"

"“I have no idea what that means, Nick,” Paulson said. “Talk normal human to me.”"

"“I don’t think it would actually make you happier to be told you were right about this,” he said finally. “I don’t want to be happy,” Dahl said. “I just want to know.”"

"You don’t win by getting through all your life not having done anything."

"“Why ‘threep’? Why ‘clank’? Slang happens.”"

"Unlike Agents Vann and Shane here, who are being wholly disingenuous, you might be speaking out of genuine ignorance and not just your usual levels of casual obstructionism."

"“Do you believe that?” I asked. “It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not,” Redhouse said."

"I was pretty certain my dad was not up to no good, running for senator notwithstanding."

"“I don’t know,” Davidson said. “Maybe it’s not about politics. Maybe these guys are just assholes.” “Seems the simplest explanation,” I said."

"You are better at small talk than I am. That is not always a compliment."

"He’s almost certainly planned for the contingency of being caught. He’s rich and he’s got more lawyers than some countries have people."

"Western Civ[ilization]’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways. The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day ­— the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in [hu]mankind’s universal antic journey to… death. On the plus side, as modern interpolators [historians]… say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, [the] land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance [which led to the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution], the Enlightenment [which led to the Industrial Revolution which, in turn, led] eventually [to] our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity [which led to the problems we face today]."

"I’ve said many times that we can expect delusional beliefs to rise in proportion to the economic hardships we experience. That is exactly what’s happening. So, it’s necessary to remind people that life is tragic and history won’t shed a tear for us if we make poor collective decisions, or adopt beliefs that are inconsistent with reality. We are proud of declaring ourselves to be a “free country.” Alas, this leaves us free to pound our civilization down a rat hole, which is what we’re doing."

"The last 150 years have amounted to such a cavalcade of wonders and technological marvels that we’ve literally programmed ourselves to expect it will continue indefinitely. This sequence of events — the telephone, the light bulb, electricity in every home, airplanes, motion pictures, television, the computer, and thousands of other conveniences to human life—programmed us to think there’s an endless supply of technological magic that can overcome anything. I think we’re heading into a time-out from technological progress as we’ve known it—and by that, I mean just the way I’ve described it, the expectation of endless magic. And I think that will come as an enormous shock to our culture."

"I don’t think the previous Dark Age that followed the collapse of Rome was quite the same as what we’re facing. That involved a profound and incremental series of losses in knowledge, technique, and the ability to do things, everything from making good pottery and concrete to ways of organizing work. Our situation now has much more potential for cultural damage, because our conditioning in technological progress is so extreme. The letdown may be awful when it becomes evident we’re not going to solve our energy problems with algae secretions, solar, wind, or other alternative fuel schemes–that we’re not going to run [high-energy things like] , the , , and the military on any combination of other energy systems. […] This has enormous potential for disrupting our sense of reality. It’s hard to predict the kinds of reaction[s] that this may generate, but I think you will have a society so profoundly disappointed by science and technology that it could propel us into a new dark age of superstition."

"…we were becoming very delusional about the set of predicaments that we’re facing. I’m a little shocked at the quality and character of the delusional thinking and where it’s coming from. When you see articles in the New York Times, the supposed newspaper of record, that the USA may soon become a net energy exporter, you know there’s some kind of problem with perhaps the entire intellectual class in America."

"Paper money is bad enough, as France learned under the tutelage of the rascal John Law in the early 1700s. The nation was broke, exhausted by foolish wars, and heaped under unbearable debt."

"Monetary inflation became a thing for the first time since Roman days — a much easier trick with printed paper banknotes than with silver coins — but the effect was the same: the evaporation of “wealth” (which is what money supposedly represents)."

"We're living in environments that are punishing us, the immersive ugliness of North American cities can be described as entropy made visible. It's a condition that drives you towards death and stasis. [...] That's what people feel when they go down these miserable boulevards filled with miserable buildings, we need to do better."

"Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation that can’t navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good enough."

"Peak [living] human population will… lag… peak [extraction of] oil and peak [extraction of other] mineral resources until these conditions express themselves as food shortages. This means that the human population will continue to rise for a while, even as we begin to encounter these... limits. It’s not possible to estimate how much the [living] population will increase because the relationship between energy and mineral resources and food production is a very fragile equation, subject to any number of discontinuities. To these, add the complications of weather disasters arising from climate change, including drought, the spread of plant diseases, and so forth. This lagging further rise in [the living] human population will only make the inevitable contraction more acute once food shortages begin. […] We're putting a strain on everything the earth has to offer us. While the combination of peak stuff and… billion[s of] [living] humans is forcing the issue, ...the truth is that circumstances will now determine what happens, not policies or personalities. [...] Population overshoot is therefore unlikely to yield to management. Rather, the usual suspects will enter the scene and do their thing: starvation, disease, [...] violence [...] [and] death [...]."

"The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in the world. Where we stand now is the brink of unprecedented damage to the ecology of the only habitable planet in the only universe we know of, and I refer not just to climate change—which may or may not be caused by human activity —but to all the other insults and injuries we’ve done to the biosphere. While industrialism led to the formation of a prosperous middle class, it also plunged millions of people into the grimmest kind of regimented quasi-slavery in conditions that were arguably no improvement over their grandparents’ lives as agricultural peasants (or their distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers)."

"Industrialism hasn’t been an abiding set of activities in any particular place but rather a dynamic cycle, of takeoff, peak, and ebb. It has rotated from region to region and country to country, along the way disposing of whole classes of people when it was through with them, chewing through habitats, resources, political systems, and landscapes. The working classes of Europe and America had their decades of factory life and the scene has shifted to Asia, which may be peaking now in the face of constraints on fossil fuels. In the United States, the cultural memory lingers on of the brief, ecstatic period after the Second World War when men on the automobile assembly lines made better salaries than college professors and factory workers enjoyed all the blandishments of suburban living. But of course that was the very peak of the cycle in America. The same class of people is now on the scrap heap, reduced to minimum-wage service jobs at best, or relegated to the cottage industry in outlawed drugs, with the gaps filled by subsidized idleness. Great Britain is a similar story, with Germany and France less eager to surrender their manufacturing."

"The more comfortable we have become with the blandishments of industrial technology, the more complexity we are burdened with —as the and the remind us—and the more likely we are to meet the very fate we are desperately trying to avoid: our rendezvous with entropy [a euphemism for death]."

"The American scene changed hugely in the 1920s. Modernity transformed everything from women’s clothing to the human imprint on the landscape. The car liberated rural America and began cluttering up the cities. The first tractors started a revolution on the farm.* Muscular American industry outinvented and outproduced all competitors around the world. Foreigners watched our movies and learned to play jazz. A sense of intoxication ran through Wall Street, prompting excessive risk-taking and wild speculation in any novelty, the participation of easily snookered, inexperienced investors buying stocks with borrowed money (“on margin”), unregulated investment pools that behaved like hedge funds do today, “bucket shops” that amounted to betting parlors, and a great deal of insider banking misconduct around financial markets that were hardly policed at all. After it all crashed in October 1929 the loss of confidence was epic. Decades later, scholars still puzzle over the cause of the Great Depression. It was a reality failure. The things that people believed in proved spectacularly unreliable, especially in the realm of money and other abstract paper extensions of it."

"Not to say that one would have to go back to a hunter-gatherer [or even a herbivore-insectivore] mode of existence in order to live on a solar budget. Pick any preindustrial culture you like, or pick the best or most relevant parts from any of them to get on with daily life, for instance, the habitations of Edo Japan, the division of labor of the Inca, the diet of the Florentines, the animal husbandry of Georgian England, the costumes of the Ming dynasty. Surely one could contrive life on a solar budget from these modes of daily endeavor and put together a satisfying existence that would amount to being civilized. Anyway, a great many of the useful inventions that made life comfortable and interesting were developed before we began using fossil fuels, quite a few of them in China alone. Add to that some additional knowledge that the human race has acquired since those historical periods, perhaps only the germ theory of disease, and you could enjoy a decent living standard. Anyway, that’s a theory. History does run backward now and then, and the centers of civilization shift from one place to another, but we've never seen anything like what we face: the crash of a turbocharged cheap energy economy along with an ecological catastrophe perhaps beyond the biblical scale. History is also not symmetrical; you don’t necessarily go down the same way you came, recapitulating earlier arrangements in the same sequence backward. What we might get instead could be just a one-way ticket to Palookaville instead of getting to relive the sixteenth century."

"An overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked into the matter agree that global warming is underway and is... caused by people burning fossil fuels. This is the meta-fact hovering over all the details. [...] In [mining and] burning so much [hydrocarbons in the form of] coal, oil, and gas [as fossil fuels] we've released [a fraction of] 460 million years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in a mere two hundred years. There are consequences for doing this. The trajectory of climate problems has gotten only more severe since I discussed the issue in The Long Emergency in 2005. Greenhouse gas emissions have exceeded predictions. The IPCC report expects a sea level rise of at least three feet [91 cm] […]; of NASA says... seventeen feet [5.18 m]. If that is the case, there would be no need to argue over the finer points of how many square miles in the Netherlands would be underwater... along with Bangladesh, many Pacific islands, most of Florida, and the Mississippi River Delta, Houston, Jacksonville, Key West, and thousands of other places."

"We can conclude that the Earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization. We maintain a most uncertain toehold in our narrow niche of comfort here, with a vast community of other living things on a planet that might have a self-regulating life of its own. I’m not altogether convinced by the Gaia theory, but there’s plenty of reason to believe in a form of cosmic equilibrium that amounts to rough justice. There are consequences for our doings, and when we cross the frontier into the realm of too much magic cosmic judgment may come thundering through our little lives like what our distant ancestors thought of as the wrath of God."

"The Internet is now assumed to be a permanent fixture of human life. I doubt it will work out that way. It has been interesting while it lasted but I’m persuaded that it will not last very far into the future. Our resource limits are too stark and pressing. The electronic server “farms” composed of massed computers require too much electricity. Networked computing is unlikely to shift soon enough (if ever) to less energy-intensive nanomachines, or computers that run “biologically,” or anything else currently on the wish list for new leaps forward. The computer industry shows little interest in our fundamental resource limits. All this will come as a huge and unhappy surprise for people accustomed to thinking of technological progress as both inevitable and a kind of entitlement. We've been so dazzled by the magic of computers that we were not paying attention to what has happened in the background. A greater irony is that the Internet, including so-called social media and cell phones, is facilitating the first stages of epochal social unrest that will synchronize with the contractions in energy and economic activity that await us presently. Angry youth may be out rioting in the streets when their cell phone service goes dark for good."

"NASA has no next-generation manned space exploration vehicle offstage. Officials have talked about developing a new rocket to put something out there, but the chatter sounds pretty vague and demoralized. I’m not persuaded that it will amount to anything. The end of the shuttle era was a poignant moment in American science, full of sad resonances for dissolving dreams of adventure in other worlds. The government is out of [real] money, and capital will only get scarcer as our fossil fuel energy inputs decline. Space travel will probably prove to have been another product of the cheap oil age, retrograde as that sounds. The truth works backward and forward, and sometimes it hurts."

"The national religion in the United States is worship of all things military. And journalists are its high priests."

"Many of the benefits from keeping Terrorism fear levels high are obvious. Private corporations suck up massive amounts of Homeland Security cash as long as that fear persists, while government officials in the National Security and Surveillance State can claim unlimited powers, and operate with unlimited secrecy and no accountability. In sum, the private and public entities that shape government policy and drive political discourse profit far too much in numerous ways to allow rational considerations of the Terror threat."

"There's a very similar and at least equally important (though far less discussed) constituency deeply vested in the perpetuation of this fear. It's the sham industry... "terrorism experts," who have built their careers on fear-mongering... and can stay relevant only if that threat does. These "terrorism experts" form an incredibly incestuous, mutually admiring little clique in and around Washington. They're employed at think tanks, academic institutions, and media outlets. They can and do have mildly different political ideologies -- some are more Republican, some are more Democratic -- but, as usual for D.C. cliques, ostensible differences in political views are totally inconsequential when placed next to their common group identity and career interest: namely, sustaining the myth of the Grave Threat... in order to justify their fear-based careers, the relevance of their circle, and their alleged "expertise." Like all adolescent, insular cliques, they defend one another reflexively whenever a fellow member is attacked, closing ranks with astonishing speed and loyalty; they take substantive criticisms very personally as attacks on their "friends," because a criticism of the genre and any member in good standing of this fiefdom is a threat..."

"There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than "Terrorism." It shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have to get information from the Terrorists); due-process-free-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists); and rampant secrecy (the Government can't disclose what it's doing or have courts rule on its legality because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism)."

"Nothing is more vital than enabling true transparency and adversarial journalism, and preventing further assaults on them."

"Several weeks ago, I wrote about the steps taken by the US government to pressure large corporations to choke off the finances and other means of support for WikiLeaks in retaliation for the group's exposure of substantial government deceit, wrongdoing and illegality. Because WikiLeaks has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, I wrote: "that the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode.""

"I disclosed that I had been involved in discussions "regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments."... Its name is Freedom of the Press Foundation...The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. Government pressure and the eager compliance of large financial corporations (such as Visa, Master Card, Bank of America, etc.) has - by design - made it extremely difficult for anyone to donate to WikiLeaks, while many people are simply afraid to directly support the group (for reasons I explained here)."

"The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday's pieties are actually shameful errors."

"The NSA and GCHQ … are obsessed with searching out any small little crevice on the planet where some forms of communication may be taking place without them being able to invade it. … They are obsessed with finding ways to invade the systems of online, onboard internet services and mobile phone services, because the very idea that human beings can communicate even for a few moments without them being able to collect and store and analyze and monitor what it is that we're saying is simply intolerable."

"The corporate press’ “myths” include “that Edward Snowden is a Russian spy... While he was in Hong Kong . . . what was being said with the same authoritative tone: ‘It’s very obvious: Edward Snowden is a Chinese spy.’ When he ended up being trapped in Moscow, the very same people who’d said that, their accusations instantly morphed into, ‘Of course, he’s a Russian spy,' without any acknowledgement they’d been saying something profoundly different just weeks earlier." ...This character assassination includes the allegation that Snowden’s motive for leaking NSA classified information is due to his being “a narcissist” — although after initially coming forward Snowden turned down numerous interview requests from top media outlets, which, Greenwald quipped, is a strange way for someone craving attention to behave... He also defended Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, whom he said had been smeared in the press for blowing the whistle... Maligning dissidents as deviant or mentally ill is a technique repressive regimes use to marginalize dissenters, Greenwald said, the rationale being that only crazy people would resist the status quo, while normal, well-adjusted people support it. He added that those reporters who are professional flatterers of the powers-that-be can’t understand someone acting and taking risks due to “conscience” because they are cowards minus consciences."

"No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. [...] A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one."

"Over the pasty decades, the fear of terrorism—stoked by consistent exaggerations of the actual threat—has been exploited by US leaders to justify a weird array of extremist policies."

"To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination."

"Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote."

"But when it became clear that Obama was not just continuing, but in many cases expanding these abuses", he said. "I realized then that I couldn't wait for a leader to fix these things. Leadership is about acting first and serving as an example for others, not waiting for others to act."

"[The first article about NSA surveillance] "It's everywhere," Snowden said, clearly excited. "I watched all your interviews. Everyone seemed to get it.""

"History leaves no doubt that collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance."

"Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the [United States] government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda."

"Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe."

"Thus, for all the government's denials, the NSA has no substantial constraints on whom it can spy and how. [...] The NSA is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability."

"More remarkable is the fact that in country after country, revelations that the NSA was spying on hundreds of millions of their citizens produced little more than muted objections from their political leadership. True indignation came gushing forward only once those leaders understood that they, and not just their citizens, had been targeted as well."

"But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers [by Huawei], foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones."

"Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and AT&T employ hordes of former top government officials, while hordes of current top defense officials are past (and likely future) employees of those same corporations. Constantly growing the surveillance state is a way to ensure that the government funds keep flowing, that the revolving door stays greased."

"Mass surveillance by the state is therefore inherently repressive, even in the unlikely case that it is not abused. [...] In Discipline and Punish, Foucault further explained that ubiquitous surveillance not only empowers authorities and compel compliance but also induces individuals to internalize their watchers. [...] Merely organizing movements of dissent becomes difficult when the government is watching everything people are doing."

"An essential deceit: that dissent from institutional authority involves a moral or ideological choice, while obedience does not. With that false premise in place, society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions. [...] The only leaks that Washington media condemns are those that contain information officials would prefer to hide."

"Nobody needed the US Constitution to guarantee press freedom so that journalists could befriend, amplify and glorify political leaders; the guarantee was necessary so that journalists could do the opposite."

"Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith hailed what he called "an underappreciated phenomenon: the patriotism of the American press". [...] The revolvind door moves the media figures into high-level Washington jobs, jut as government officials often leave office to the reward of a lucrative media contract."

"Today, for many in the profession, praise from the government for "responsible" reporting—for taking its direction about what should and should not be published—is a badge of honor. That this is the case is the true measure of how far adversarial journalism in the United States has fallen."

"What is lost when the private realm is abolished are many of the attributes typically associated with quality of life. Most people have experienced how privacy enables liberation from constraint. And we’ve all, conversely, had the experience of engaging in private behavior when we thought we were alone – dancing, confessing, exploring sexual expression, sharing untested ideas – only to feel shame at having been seen by others."

"Forgoing privacy in a quest for absolute safety is as harmful to a healthy psyche and life of an individual as it is to a healthy political culture. For the individual, safety first means a life of paralysis and fear, never entering a car or airplane, never engaging in an activity that entails risk, never weighing quality of life over quantity, and paying any price to avoid danger. [...] A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up its liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security. However, absolute safety is itself chimeric, pursued but never obtained. The pursuit degrades those who engage in it as well as any nation that comes to be defined by it."

"Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name. [...] Conversely, the presumption is that the government, with rare exceptions, will not know anything that law-abiding citizens are doing. [...] Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else."

"Even the most committed activists are often tempted to succumb to defeatism The prevailing institutions seem too powerful to challenge; orthodoxies feel to entrenched to uproot; there are always many parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret, who can decide what kind of world we want to live in. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistleblowing, of activism, of political [[journalism]. And that's what is happening now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden."

"Those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully."

"Imposing or propping up dictators subservient to the U.S. has long been, and continues to be, the preferred means for U.S. policymakers to ensure that those inconvenient popular beliefs are suppressed. None of this is remotely controversial or even debatable. U.S. support for tyrants has largely been conducted out in the open, and has been expressly defended and affirmed for decades by the most mainstream and influential U.S. policy experts and media outlets."

"The foreign policy guru most beloved and respected in Washington, Henry Kissinger, built his career on embracing and propping up the most savage tyrants because of their obeisance to U.S. objectives. Among the statesman’s highlights, as documented, he "pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan"; "began the U.S.’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran"; and "supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America." Kissinger congratulated for its and carried out by one of the 20th century’s worst monsters, the Indonesian dictator and close U.S. ally ."

"In sum, the post-World War II — independent of its massive human rights violations committed over and over around the world — has been predicated on and, even more so, . This policy has been applied all over the world, on multiple continents and by every administration. It is impossible to understand even the most basic aspects of the U.S. role in the world without knowing that."

"One of the odd aspects of animal mistreatment in the U.S. is that species regarded as more intelligent and emotionally complex — dogs, dolphins, cats, primates — generally receive more public concern and more legal protection. Yet pigs – among the planet’s most intelligent, social, and emotionally complicated species, capable of great joy, play, love, connection, suffering and pain, at least on a par with dogs — receive almost no protections, and are subject to savage systematic abuse by U.S. factory farms."

"In sum, with industry insiders dominating the sole agency (USDA) with the authority to regulate factory farms, animals that are captive, abused, tortured, and slaughtered en masse have little chance, even when it comes to just applying existing laws with a minimal amount of diligence. The politics of the U.S. — including the fact that a key farm state, Iowa, plays such a central role in presidential elections — means there are massive forces arrayed behind factory farms, and very few in support of animal welfare."

"In general, the core moral and philosophical question at the heart of animal rights activism is now being seriously debated: Namely, what gives humans the right or justification to abuse, exploit, and torture non-human species? If there comes a day when some other species (broadly defined) — such as machines — surpass humans in intellect and cognitive complexity, will they have a valid moral claim to treat humans as commodities whose suffering and death can be assigned no value? The irreconcilable contradiction of lavishing love and protection on dogs and cats, while torturing and slaughtering farm animals capable of a deep emotional life and great suffering, is becoming increasingly apparent."

"There is a temptation to turn away from and ignore this mass suffering and cruelty because it’s so painful to confront, so much more pleasant to remain unaware of it. Animal rights activists are determined to prevent us from doing so, and we should all feel gratitude for their increasing success in making us see what we are enabling when we consume the products of this barbaric and sociopathic industry."

"Don't even try that pathetic tactic. Huge numbers of people are disgusted by what you're doing. She's a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors & half-Mexican. And maybe as a gay Jew, I also have a personal stake in who is and isn't an actual Nazi. You don't own this discourse."

"Last week, the New York Times reported that the FBI, in 2017, launched an investigation of President Trump “to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security” and specifically “whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” ...As usual – this melodrama was accomplished by steadfastly ignoring the now-standard, always-buried paragraph pointing out the boring fact that no actual evidence of guilt has yet emerged."

"The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump is far from the first time that the FBI has monitored, surveilled and investigated U.S. elected officials.... It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures whose loyalties they regard as “suspicious,” and whose political career they regard as a “national security threat,” simply because those politicians express policy positions about U.S. adversaries that the FBI dislikes... If a politician adopts policy views... which is unduly accommodating to America’s adversaries or “enemies,” that’s not a crime and the FBI thus has no business using its vast investigative powers against...[them]"

"Obviously, if there is reason to suspect that actual crimes have been committed... then it’s not just permissible but vital that the FBI investigate such allegations... But the FBI investigation... clearly based, at least in part, on the FBI’s disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy views and the agency’s assessment that such policies fail to safeguard “U.S. interests” as the FBI defines them. The NYT notes that among the events that prompted the investigation were that Trump “refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail...”"

"MSNBC IS A dishonest political operation, not a news outlet. It systematically and deliberately refuses to adopt a defining attribute of a news outlet: a willingness to acknowledge factual errors, correct them, and apologize. That they not only allow their lies to stand uncorrected but reward their employees who do it most frequently — especially when those lies are directed at adversaries of the Democratic Party — proves that they are, first and foremost, a political arm of the Democratic establishment."

"The most recent example is as glaring as it is malicious. On Saturday in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders delivered his first speech for his 2020 presidential campaign in front of thousands of people. MSNBC broadcast the speech live, and anyone can watch the full two-hour event, or just Sanders’s full 35-minute speech, on YouTube. As a result, there’s no confusion possible about what was said. Everyone can see it with their own eyes."

"Indeed, as is almost always true for MSNBC, all of these pleas that they correct their false claim have been steadfastly ignored — no correction issued — because, as I’ve repeatedly documented, lying about adversaries of the Democratic establishment is not merely tolerated or permitted at MSNBC, but is encouraged and rewarded. That’s why they purposely had the very first person to comment on Sanders’s kickoff campaign speech be a paid Clinton 2016 campaign official highly embittered toward Sanders, and it’s why MSNBC does not correct lies no matter how loudly, clearly, or indisputably you document those lies to them."

"News outlets correct lies. Slimy political operations deliberately use lies to advance their agenda and smear their adversaries. MSNBC has proven over and over again that they are decisively in the latter category. This is just the latest but by no means the only or even worst example."

"Every major U.S. war of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing at air questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack... This was exactly the tactic used on February 23, when the narrative shifted radically in favor of those U.S. officials who want regime change operations in Venezuela... they vehemently stated that the trucks were set on fire, on purpose, by President Nicolas Maduro’s forces."

"On Saturday night, the New York Times published a detailed video and accompanying article proving that this entire story was a lie. The humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces. They were set on fire by anti-Maduro protesters who threw a molotov cocktail that hit one of the trucks. And the NYT’s video traces how the lie spread: from U.S. officials who baselessly announced that Maduro burned them to media outlets that mindlessly repeated the lie..."

"Other media outlets endorsed the lie while at least avoiding what CNN did by personally vouching for it. “Humanitarian aid destined for Venezuela was set on fire, seemingly by troops loyal to Mr Maduro,” The Telegraph claimed. The BBC uncritically printed: “There have also been reports of several aid trucks being burned – something Mr Guaidó said was a violation of the Geneva Convention.”"

"That lie – supported by incredibly powerful video images – changed everything. Ever since, that Maduro burned trucks filled with humanitarian aid was repeated over and over as proven fact on U.S. news outlets. Immediately after it was claimed, politicians...U.S. news stars and think tank luminaries...took a leading role in beating the war drums..."

"Everything the New York Times so proudly reported last night has been known for weeks, and was already reported in great detail, using extensive evidence, by a large number of people... While the NYT’s article and video are perfectly good and necessary journalism, the credit they are implicitly claiming for themselves for exposing this lie is totally undeserved."

"That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets..."

"As has been true since President Harry Truman’s creation of the CIA after World War II, interfering in other countries and dictating or changing their governments — through campaigns of mass murder, military coups, arming guerrilla groups, the abolition of democracy, systemic disinformation, and the imposition of savage despots — is regarded as a divine right, inherent to American exceptionalism. Anyone who questions that or, worse, opposes it and seeks to impede it (as the CIA perceived Trump was) is of suspect loyalties at best."

"The all-consuming Russiagate narrative that dominated the first three years of Trump’s presidency further served to elevate the CIA as a noble and admirable institution while whitewashing its grotesque history. Liberal conventional wisdom held that Russian Facebook ads, Twitter bots and the hacking and release of authentic, incriminating DNC emails was some sort of unprecedented, off-the-charts, out-of-the-ordinary crime-of-the-century attack, with several leading Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) actually comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor."

"The level of historical ignorance and/or jingostic American exceptionalism necessary to believe this is impossible to describe. Compared to what the CIA has done to dozens of other countries since the end of World War II, and what it continues to do, watching Americans cast Russian interference in the 2016 election through online bots and email hacking (even if one believes every claim made about it) as some sort of unique and unprecedented crime against democracy is staggering. Set against what the CIA has done and continues to do to “interfere” in the domestic affairs of other countries — including Russia — the 2016 election was, at most, par for the course for international affairs and, more accurately, a trivial and ordinary act in the context of CIA interference."

"In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life."

"But what makes these trends all the more disturbing is that they long predated the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the left in its wake and the . Indeed, since at least the , when first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration acted to protect the interests of the tycoons who caused it while allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and , the indicia of collective mental health in the U.S. have been blinking red."

"Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories."

"After. .. news outlets have published ... emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000..."

"We submitted nine questions to his (Joe Biden's) campaign... that the public has the absolute right to know, including:... whether Biden ever knew about business proposals in Ukraine or China being pursued by his son and brother in which Biden was a proposed participant and, how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement... had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective...."

"Though the Biden campaign indicated that they would respond to the Intercept’s questions, they have not done so. Much of this controversy centers on Biden's aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S... These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid."

"Why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief prosecutor of Ukraine was? The standard answer to the question about Biden's motive — offered both by Biden and his media defenders — is that he, along with the IMF and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant in fighting corruption .... "Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as," wrote the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in what the Post calls a "fact-check.""

"Kessler also endorsed the key defense of Biden: that the firing of Shokhin was bad for Burima, not good for it. "The United States viewed [Shokhin] as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine's corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky," Kessler claims.... But that claim does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their markets to U.S. companies."

"All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son's business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation's most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them."

"It's so ironic they [the Democratic Party] spent four years claiming they are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, and what are they trying to do now? They're trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody."

"[T]he Democratic Party, which now controls the House, the Senate and the White House genuinely believes they have a monopoly on objective truth. They believe they're the party of science and rationality, and that the only way to disagree with them is if you're either a deranged conspiracy theorist or a seditionist, somebody who is engaged in criminal conduct or terrorism."

"And therefore, they genuinely believe, it's not a show. It's not a pretext. They all have convinced one another through this echo chamber that they've created, essentially, the entire media except this network, which is why they want to shut it down, that if you disagree with their orthodoxies and their consensus, you are a threat and a danger."

"[About Twitter being banned in Brazil, Pavel Durov being arrested in France, and Rumble being blocked in Brazil and France:] You see this rapidly escalating, unfolding extremely menacing scheme of censorship which is 'You either remove every dissident, every idea, that we don't like, that we deem false, that we deem harmful, or we will, in the case of France, imprison you and your executives the minute you step foot into the EU, or we'll just block your entire platform from being available in our country at all. And we will only allow those platforms that maintain a closed system of information for our citizens to hear and say only what we think they should be hearing and saying.' This is happening in the democratic world, the obstensibly Western Democratic world. I cannot do anything more in terms of words to express how extreme, how severe, and how dangerous this trend is. We could see it coming for several years now and it is here."

"Ever since [Greenwald] blotted his copybook backing Iraq, he’s played the principled non-interventionist with all the irritating simple-mindedness of a reformed drunk. His new view, nice and simple, is that all intervention is bad, everywhere and every time. So when [Greenwald] hears that the French Army has intervened in Mali, his first-generation moral software picks up the word “intervention” and does the rest, a nice simple Jetsons way of dealing with a wiggly, complicated world. Intervention = Bad; Mali = Intervention; therefore Mali = bad. … What blew me away was the simple-mindedness of it. It was pretty clear that [Greenwald] didn’t know a thing about Mali and, what pissed me off more, he didn’t think he had any reason to learn. That’s one thing he has in common with the Jihadis (and the Baptists too): they all think there’s one right way, and can’t be bothered with local variations. Local schmocal, that’s how you think when you’ve got 'The Truth' on your side."

"When the journalist Glenn Greenwald attacked me as an Islamophobe, insisting that my concerns about Islam were both irrational and a symptom of my own bigotry and white privilege, I responded by challenging him on Twitter to a duel of cartoon contests. He could hold one for Islam, and I would hold one for any other religion on earth. That shut him up immediately."

"The global warming crowd is using all the surface data, including cities like L.A. to support their claim, and the data is flawed because it's influenced by human development. It's about asphalt, not the atmosphere."

"I'm betting on the sun's increased activity in the last century, and that CO2 doesn't matter much because its effect is overwhelmed by everything else in our atmosphere that also acts as a greenhouse gas, mostly water vapor."

"I'm comfortable with my position because I see clear evidence that climate change is driven mainly by the sun."

"CO2 is far from being the biggest greenhouse gas. Chloroflourocarbons (CFC's) commonly used as refrigerants [are] far worse. Of naturally created GHG's, Methane is 23 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2. Nitrous Oxide is even worse at 296. So far no emergency legislation has been authored to eliminate the effect of cows or dental surgeons."

"The sun is still the number 1 factor in our energy balance. No matter how much people argue about CO2, they can't successfully explain the pre industrial revolution 900-1300AD Medieval Warming Period or the cold 1645-1715 AD Maunder Sunspot Minimum that coincided with European crop failure, famine and disease while linking it with our modern day issues with CO2 to climate change. Yet sunspots and solar cycles can and do explain both."

"If both Mars and Earth are experiencing global warming, then maybe there is a larger phenomenon going on in the Solar System that is causing their global climates to change, like changes in the Sun."

"It's all about the sun. Just take a look at the picture above and notice just how small earth is compared to the sun, or even a large solar flare. Anybody whom thinks the human race has more effect on our global energy balance than an active sun does is just deluding themselves."

"Should a record setting year or string of them be cause for alarm? Personally I don't think so."

"I've been saying this all along… the sun is the Big Kahuna of climate change on earth."

"As I've always said, the sun is the "Big Kahuna" of climate change on Earth. Everything else is secondary, even though man's opinion of his own self importance in the scheme of things often dictates otherwise."

"[T]he folks who would have you believe that our climate is driven by increasing CO2 and nothing else, will continue to ignore the sun, as it serves their agenda to do so."

"The UK's Channel 4 premiered a 75-minute film titled, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Through interviews with prize-winning climate experts and others, this masterful documentary explains the origins of global warming alarmism; factually addresses claims of manmade global climate change; exposes the motivations of organizations, scientists and activists sounding the alarm; and explains why it's been extremely difficult, if not downright career killing, for scientists to question global warming orthodoxy publicly. While presenting hard facts, it is artfully done, making it watchable for the layman and scientist alike."

"The emphasis this week seems to be on the sun, and the fact that maybe its really the sun which has been driving climate change after all. That's what I've been saying for years, because its just unrealistic to ignore the largest and single most important contributor to our planets energy balance and to only focus on made-made CO2 and nothing else."

"So what's easier to believe as the cause of climate change? That a trace gas called CO2 that has increased on earth from about 280 PPM to 380 PPM in the last 100 years is the cause, or that the giant nuclear fireball a thousand times bigger than earth a mere 8 light-minutes away has been getting more active during the same period is the reason?"

"I have to think that because NASA chose to co-author this paper [LaDochy et al., 2007] with researchers at California State University, that some of the statewide "global warming as man-made problem bias" crept into the thinking for the purpose of this paper, i.e. "we need another study to show that its getting hotter so action is justified"."

"Our earth is warmed by a gigantic nuclear fireball, millions of times the mass of earth and a mere 8.5 light-minutes away. One hundred and nine Earths would be required to fit across the Sun's disk, and its interior could hold over 1.3 million Earths. ... You can't just ignore that kind of power. Though it seems some prefer to, since it muddles the results they seek."

"James Carville used to remind Clinton during the '92 campaign that "its the economy, stupid". I say that on the subject of Global Warming: "its the SUN, stupid"."

"It's been warmer than today's climate in the past, much warmer. It has been colder than this climate in the past, much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. ... So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we’ve only had this supposedly evil earth killing CO2 belching technology a mere speck of that time? Because, many believe global warming is real and there are people in our political world who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them, so they say "let us handle it". To make that transition easier, they trot out this false premise, that we are totally responsible for natural occurrences in the long span of our planetary history."

"When we look at the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument, it seems on the surface that we are completely full of ourselves and yet at the same time terribly dubious, sometimes completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility as a cause célèbre. We show no faith in ourselves by accepting this idea that we’ve caused Global Warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. These are hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of the few whom offer us the way to salvation."

"Often we lose sight of our place in the universe, some never knew at all just how miniscule we humans are compared to everything else."

"So we have three planets now with a warming trend; Earth, Mars, and Neptune. That's not an insignificant coincidence."

"In my opinion, the premise of CO2 burial seems absurd not only because of the lack of supporting evidence for certain climate change, but also due to it's lack of foresight as to the effects of the burial scheme."

"You know, for as much as we humans think we really have control over our planet, nature tends to remind us from time to time that we are just flyspecks in the vastness of space and energy."

"Why would a committee award such a prestigious prize right on the heels of his documentary [An Inconvenient Truth] being proven inaccurate and prone to exaggerations?"

"To me, the fact that the suns magnetic field is linked more closely to earth now lends credence to theories like that of Henrik Svensmark, which points to an extraterrestrial driver of climate change, cosmic rays which form cloud nuclei in our atmosphere, modulated by solar variance."

"I'm not sure the "remarkable Arctic warmth" is real, especially since the disappearance of arctic sea ice during that time has been linked not to warmer temperatures, but to wind patterns by other researchers at NASA."

"The vanity held by many of us puny humans tends to bolster a belief that we control our own destiny within the universe, or are even masters of our own climate control. Recent events such as the PDO shift remind us that the slow but powerful forces of nature remain in control."

"The Surface Stations site has been up two days now, and I’m getting hundreds of registrations across the country from people wanting to get involved in the grass roots effort to photograph, measure, catalog and contribute to the database of weather stations. I’m getting inquires from Congress, Policy think tanks, and bloggers worldwide... I’ve been invited to submit a research paper, and I’m having a lot of fun too. Now I know why I lost the school board election, it was to give me time to do this. Everything happens for a reason."

"There's a tendency to view ourselves, our endeavors, and our accomplishments as the pinnacle. Yet, compared to whats in our solar system, whats in our galaxy, and whats in our universe, we are but a mere speck in the vastness of time, space, mass, and energy."

"And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth's magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars. Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We'd do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate."

"Of course we all know that the human race has historically done better during warm periods. While we've seen a slight warming in the last century, we've also seen a worldwide improvement in the human condition. Warm – what's not to like?"

"That the climate has always changed. It has never been static. In the past it has seen extremes hotter and colder than what we experience today. So change is normal."

"I would say that the polar ice has disappeared in the past. Certainly there seems to be evidence of past climate situations where we may have had virtually no or none during the summertime. In the immediate future, however, I don't think we are going to see that. In fact, we're going through a rebound right now."

"Name calling and labeling does nothing but lower your own level of discourse, when you have no other facts to present, which is why alarmists often resort to name calling and labeling."

"Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is the report on global warming the United Nations' climate panel should have written – but didn't."

"This goes back to the reason why alarmists abandoned the "global warming" term in favor of climate change. They can play this bait and switch, showing changes in climate (which always exist) and then blaming them on CO2. But there is no mechanism ever proposed by anyone where CO2 can change the climate directly without going through the intermediate step of warming. If climate is changing but we are not seeing warming, then the change can't be due to CO2."

"I would say this boils down to a war between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the people that are getting all the funding. They're getting millions and millions of dollars of funding. The skeptics, we get scraps, we do things on our own. I funded most of the project on my own. And so who should you trust? People that are being paid for an opinion, paid for an output, versus someone who is not being paid for an output, and I think that's the question."

"The warming propaganda machine has lost its momentum and is desperate to get it back. They want to silence Lord Monckton and remove him from the field. To that end they'll say anything. ... Yet when granted a fair forum for debate, it is Monckton who triumphs."

"Global warming had become essentially a business in its own right. There are NGOs, there are organizations, there are whole divisions of universities that have set up to study this, this factor, and so there's lots of money involved and then so I think that there's a tendency to want to keep that going and not really look at what might be different."

""Global warming" suggests a steady linear increase in temperature, but since that isn't happening, proponents have shifted to the more universal term "climate change," which can be liberally applied to just about anything observable in the atmosphere."

"Watts has his critics who take issue with his stance on global warming. He acknowledges a warming trend, but believes humans have only had a slight impact. He points to the sun and the tremendous amount of energy it kicks out as having a far greater role in Earth's heating and cooling."

"While many believe humans are leading contributors to global warming, Watts has theorized the sun may play a bigger role. He said the data deserves a second look, especially because of the large amount of money involved."

"A careful, honest man of science, all [Anthony] Watts would say for sure was that his findings and all the strange cold-weather events of this winter prove only one thing so far -- that "Mother Nature is still in control of things, not us.""

"The indefatigable Anthony Watts, having noticed that the raw data for many individual stations in the GISS dataset had been "processed" so as to turn a century of actual cooling into a century of spurious warming, wondered whether the "processed" data itself had been altered over time with the aim of producing an ever-higher apparent (but bogus) rate of "global warming" over the 20th century. He found that this was indeed the case."

"Jo wanted to be pumped up before she went on to do a scene, she asked me to slap her... They did the scene over and over, never quite right. Every time she came over to me and asked me to hit her, and hit her harder."

"On working with in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); as quoted in Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2003) by Leslie Halliwell (ed. John Walker), p. 468"

"As actors it is easy for us to play the hero. We get to fight the bad guys and stand up for justice. In real life, the choices are not always so clear. The Hollywood Blacklist, recreated powerfully on screen in Trumbo, was a time I remember well. The choices were hard. The consequences were painful and very real. During the blacklist, I had friends who went into exile when no one would hire them; actors who committed suicide in despair. My young co-star in Detective Story (1951), Lee Grant, was unable to work for twelve years after she refused to testify against her husband before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I was threatened that using a Blacklisted writer for Spartacus –– my friend Dalton Trumbo — would mark me as a “Commie-lover” and end my career. There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I am so proud of my fellow actors who use their public influence to speak out against injustice. At 98 years old, I have learned one lesson from history: It very often repeats itself. I hope that Trumbo, a fine film, will remind all of us that the Blacklist was a terrible time in our country, but that we must learn from it so that it will never happen again."

"The foreign directors are always fumbling about in obscurity, and the critics are always writing about the juxtaposition of black and white and the existential dilemma and all that shit, to disguise the fact that they don't understand the first damn thing about it either."

"I know Italians and I like them. A lot of my father's best friends were Italians. I responded to that in making the picture. I put a lot of warmth into that character. Those immigrants were tough, more intensive than people are these days."

"I love champions. A champion has something special about him."

"Compared to Thoreau, Saint Francis of Assisi was peanuts."

"Too often, I have not been what I wanted to be I've succumbed to pressures. Yes, I have. The things I've done that I liked, I've always done against advice. The bad films everybody was high on. The good films, they advised me against."

"Don't crucify me because of what your idea of a movie star is. I didn't start out to be a movie star. I started out to be an actor. You people out in the East have no idea what goes on out here. No awareness or knowledge whatsoever. You lose track of the human being behind the image of the movie star."

"I find characters with a little evil in them much more interesting to play than the good guy. I'd rather play than ."

"I don't know if they have to care. I'm only concerned if they're interested in me. I don't care if you love me or hate me, but don't be indifferent to me. That to me is the worst thing."

"I've worked with Mankiewicz, Hawks, Kazan, Wyler, Wilder. I've been very fortunate. All of them work differently. I've even directed a couple of pictures, so I have respect for the work. But no matter what anyone says, it's a collaborative art form. I think the problem is that we've been contaminated by the European concept of the Auteur System. I've had movies where I bought the book, developed the script and cast the whole picture, but then the director walks in and says, "It must be a John Smith film." I think sometimes we emphasize that too much."

"I told him, "Michael, you're the kind of producer I'd like to work with because you give everything to the other person even when you're in the movie." He did that in Romancing the Stone (1984). He focused all the attention on the girl Kathleen Turner. I haven't been that generous. I've been a producer, but I find a product like Spartacus or The Vikings or Seven Days in May or Paths of Glory and somehow there always seems to be a good part for me."

"I renet it when I hear some of these young actors say they won't sell a picture. I've always felt that's part of my responsibility—to help getting people to see a movie. Funny thing is I don't even remember any of these young guy's names. I want to spank them."

"Dennis Rodman says North Korea is 'not that bad'. Dennis Rodman is deeply stupid."

"Andy, I’ve spent more time overseas than you ever have in your little life, so don’t tell me about I’m laughing this stuff off"

"That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world. We see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over."

"If there are any young people watching: at some point in your life you will become the people you used to make fun of"

"The Harris town hall – a stand-in for the second presidential debate – will start at 9pm ET on Wednesday, hosted by Anderson Cooper"

"Terror em Israel (23/10/2023) Youtube video"

"Anderson Cooper had a realization about a hostage during a live interview with his parents (youtube CNN Oct 24, 2023)"

"In the same way, it is not necessarily paternalistic to advocate the restriction of air pollution. Individual citizens and firms may produce more air pollution than any of them actually want because they know that there is little to be gained from uncoordinated individual restraint. If I avoid driving a gas-guzzling car, the impact on the overall level of air pollution w ill be utterly insignificant. So I have no incentive to take it into account in making my driving decisions even if I care greatly about reducing air pollution. Widespread public ignorance is a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment."

"When I used my real name, all of a sudden there was a lot of commentary. 'Oh, you're a woman' or 'You can't really be a woman' or 'You don't write like a woman.' Or all of a sudden my arguments were not taken as seriously or were judged as hysterical or emotional.... So I got much more interested in why this was happening."

"Wikipedia needs to recruit women, yes, but, more importantly, it needs to recruit feminists. And feminists can be of any gender."

"When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom."

"Teachers frequently talk about moments in which they became students again and how much that made them better teachers. For me, there has been no better way to improve my teaching, specifically my teaching in the composition classroom, than to take up a subject at which I am abysmal."

"For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian”. I am now “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber”."

"Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth"

"If a piece of information is wrong or misrepresented on Wikipedia, it affects the way the entire world sees that topic."

"We definitely wanna increase the number of women. But just increasing the number of women isn’t necessarily going to– improve the– the fact that content on Wikipedia itself is skewed."

"So I think one thing that Wikipedia has to do as a culture is ask itself, 'Are we willing– to be this– this self-selecting– and– and be this small?' We can have many more people if we’re willing to be a more welcoming community."

"So in one respect, I would say that we need to add the voice of feminists to Wikipedia who are going to talk about– women as underrepresented groups."

"I know something about how the first encyclopedias were developed in the 18th century. And those encyclopedias almost completely excluded the history of women. And it’s one argument that we make all the time."

"When we’re talking both to Wikipedians and people outside of Wikipedia, we say, 'Look, if we want to include all of these other narratives besides the typical narrative that we usually tell of dead white men, we’ve gotta get it in there now.'"

"We brought in an innovative group of young digital humanists led by Adrianne Wadewitz."

"When Wadewitz showed Wikipedia's main page to her class one day, she found that the women featured were largely sexualised or portrayed as victims of a crime, while people of colour were represented as perpetrators of a crime."

"Adrianne Wadewitz exemplifies the early-career professional HASTAC Scholars is designed to mentor . . . because she represents the best of academe."

"Adrianne Wadewitz is a model of the future we all want for our profession, for our students, for our society."

"It is a huge loss for Wikipedia. She may have been our single biggest contributor on these topics — female authors, women’s history."

"Ms. Wadewitz’s interest in rock climbing played out on Wikipedia. Her last editing was to improve an article about Steph Davis, a prominent female climber and wingsuit flier. In Ms. Wadewitz’s hands, the article became filled with personal details, spectacular photos, a highlighted quotation and 25 footnotes."

"Wadewitz was probably best known as a longtime Wikipedia editor. She edited her first entry in 2004, and went on to create pages for female writers, scholars, and their works, editing nearly 50,000 posts in total"

"If you've ever used the crowd-sourced encyclopedia to find information on female writers (especially those from Dr. Wadewitz's area of expertise), it's likely that you've run into her work."

"Wadewitz used Wikipedia as a way to spread and improve knowledge on the period she focused, adding to biographies of women writers and thinkers. Wadewitz made her first edit on July 18, 2004, and over the course of her career made approximately 49,000 edits."

"Unlike the Wikipedia editor stereotype, Wadewitz was not a young male who was tech-obsessed. Still she found Wikipedia appealing as a way to spread her academic knowledge, which was sometimes seen by few, whereas her encyclopedic entries might be read by millions."

"While nearly all of us use the Internet to fact check, learn about topics and read the news, some of us contribute more than others to the knowledge pool. Adrianne Wadewitz was one such woman."

"Wadewitz was an educator who did not live to make money from her knowledge. Instead, she chose to spread her knowledge as freely as possible for the good of readers everywhere."

"One of the things about Adrianne I was always grateful for was that she always wanted to learn and experience more things in the world. She was very thoughtful and interested. She loved literature and reading."

"She really was a person who cared very much about others. She worked for justice and inclusion and making sure that women's voices were heard. She wasn't willing to just accept the world as we were told it was, but worked to help make it more beautiful. I am very grateful for her bringing that into my life."

"Dr. Wadewitz wrote and edited extensively on Wikipedia during the final 10 years of her life, contributing 36 featured articles and more than 49,000 edits."

"Legendary in the Wikipedia world, Wadewitz had more than 50,000 'edits' or contributions to her credit. She also was the author of 36 'featured' articles, the highest distinction bestowed by other Wikipedians based on accuracy, fairness, style and comprehensiveness."

"Wadewitz eventually came out as a Wikipedian, the term the encyclopedia uses to describe the tens of thousands of volunteers who write and edit its pages. A rarity as a woman in the male-centric Wikipedia universe, she became one of its most valued and prolific contributors as well as a force for diversifying its ranks and demystifying its inner workings."

"She was one of the top 10 editors in terms of producing a lot of high-quality content. Wikipedia is full of brilliant, talented people. She really stood out."

"Archivists take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. You think there's a troll behind the screen and don't know what's going on, what's the accountability. She walked us through this great unknown, Wikipedia land. She put us at ease."

"The 37-year-old was remarkable not just for Wadewitz’ Wikipedia contributions, but for her focus on chronicling the overwhelmingly under-researched roles played by women in history and present-day life."

"Wadewitz, a US academic, became one of the most prolific and influential editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia."

"Wadewitz said to attract more women editors, attitudes within the Wikipedia community need to change. This became clear when she revealed her gender, after writing anonymously for several years."

"Android and the DROID X are, warts and all, already neck and neck with the iPhone 4. It's scary to think how one-sided this would be if Google just put a handful of UI experts on the [Android app] marketplace. Game over, Apple. Game over."

"Is this thing even worth reviewing? Right off the bat, I'm glad to see that my initial reactions to this thing were accurate. Anyone who believes this thing is a game changer is a tool. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is."

"These early [Windows Phone sales] reports don't provide any credible figures. But even if sales are as bad as all get-out, you're forgetting one thing: It almost doesn't matter, because Microsoft is in this for the long haul. They're going to continue pushing this system ahead, and pushing it to developers and users."

"Apple is a hugely successful company and its Mac business, even though it trails the wider PC market by a wide margin, is a great business, a very, very successful and desirable business. For Apple. Why anyone would care about that, other than employees of Apple, is unclear to me."

"Apple's fans are more interested in spending money than they are with facts. … That the lackluster iPhone 4S can sell so well in a market dominated by more capable Android handsets (not to mention Windows Phones) only bolsters that notion."

"Make no mistake, this transition is happening. ... The world we're heading toward belongs to Windows RT."

"There are three [Apple Watch] lineups that range in price from "just" $350 for an Apple Sport stripper model with low-end materials to an astonishing $17,000 for an 18 karat gold silly version. As I noted on Twitter, this isn't consumer electronics anymore. It's consumerism run amok."

"Apple Watch is superfluous, an unnecessary accessory that literally no one needs. ... it just seems so pointless. ... I understand, even accept, that Apple hardware purchases involve most of the points made above and that most fans of the company simply don’t care or are essentially pushing their fingers into their ears and going "na-na-na-na" so they can’t hear the logic of the argument against their buying decisions. I am at peace with this."

"[Apple] events are tough for non-sycophants such as myself. I don't take everything Apple says at face value, as they would prefer. And I certainly don't buy into the theory that the world's most profitable company is in any way out to help humanity or make the world a better place."

"[T]he facial scanner in the iPhone X is based on the technology that Microsoft first used, disastrously, in its Xbox Kinect sensor. This probably explains why [Apple's Face ID] works so poorly: If Microsoft could never perfect this in a relatively huge device, how could Apple's component makers ever fit the technology into 'a space a few centimeters across and millimeters deep'?"

"I was never really in love with acting. I always love movies and going to the theater. But did I love being in this business? Not for five minutes. I did it because I needed a job. For the first year or two, it's like a poison that enters your body. It's like a virus, and your body has to release antidotes. But it would be very unfair to say that it's that way all the time. It's just like anything this overwhelming that you enter suddenly. It's like being a contact at West Point. You're thrown into an intense environment. From the word go, you realize it's sink or swim."

"Democrats of the seventies and eighties are too tolerant, too open-minded, not feral enough. I want to be a ferocious liberal."

"My dad turned 40 in October 1967 … in April '68 Martin Luther King was killed. In June '68 Robert Kennedy was killed. And in the fall of '68, my dad's mother died. He was left, on an existential level, saying, "This is what I am. I've got the love of my students and I've got nothing else. My country is going to hell." After 1968, he was never the same again. All the air went out of him."

"Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for the animals. Do it for the environment, and do it for your health."

"I was in love when I was married to Kim Basinger, I’m not ashamed to say. I used to wake up in the morning and just look at her and say 'What do you want for breakfast, baby? Special K with blueberries? Let me go get some.'"

"Economists’ instincts are that uncertainty about current prices, future prices, and the real meaning of nominal trade-offs between the present and the future; distortions introduced by the failure of government finance to be inflation-neutral; windfall redistributions; and the focusing of attention not on preferences, factors of production, and technologies but on predicting the future evolution of nominal magnitudes must degrade the functioning of the price system and reduce the effectiveness of the market economy at providing consumer utility. The cumulative jump in the price level as a result of the inflation of the 1970s may have been very expensive to the United States in terms of the associated reduction in human welfare."

"Fifteen years ago, I found it easy to be in favor of international capital mobility -- the free flow of investment financing from one country to another. Then it was easy to preach for an end to all systems of controls on capital that hindered this flow. Now it is harder."

"In my view, Marx has trapped himself. He has been primed to expect a deeper layer of real reality underneath mere appearances. And he has chosen the wrong model of the underlying real reality--the labor theory of value, which is simply not a very good model of the averages around which prices fluctuate. Socially-necessary labor power usually serves as an upper bound to value--if something sells for more, then a lot of people are going to start making more of them, and the prices at which it trades are going to fall. But lots of things sell for much less than the prices corresponding to their socially-necessary labor power lots of the time. And so Marx vanishes into the swamp which is the attempt to reconcile the labor theory of value with economic reality, and never comes out."

"Hayek says that the problem with classical liberalism was that it was not pure enough. The government needed to restrict itself to establishing the rule of law and to using antitrust to break up monopolies. It was the overreach of the government beyond those limits, via central banking and social democracy, that caused all the trouble. A democratic government needs to limit itself to rule of law and antitrust–and perhaps soup kitchens and shelters. And what if democracy turns out not to produce a government that limits itself to those activities? Then, Hayek says, so much the worse for democracy. A Pinochet is then called for to, in a Lykourgan moment, minimalize the state. After social democracy has been leveled and the rubble cleared away, then–perhaps–a limited range of issues can be discussed and debated by a–limited–restored democracy, with some kind of group of right-wing army officers descended from latifundistas Council of Guardians in the background to ensure that property remains sacred and protected, and the government small enough to fit in a bathtub. […] Hayek was formed in Austria. From his perspective the property and enterprise respecting Imperial Habsburg government of Franz Josef eager to make no waves, to hold what it has, and to keep the lid off the pressure cooker appears not unattractive. This is especially so when you contrasted would be really existing authoritarian alternatives: anti-Semitic populist demagogue mayors of Vienna; nationalist Serbian or Croatian politicians interested in maintaining popular legitimacy by waging class war or ethnic war; separatists who seek independence and then one man, one vote, one time. An “authoritarian” after the manner of Franz Josef looks quite attractive in this context–and if you convince yourself but they are as dedicated to small government neoliberalism as you are, and that the Lykourgan moment of the form will be followed by soft rule and popular assent, so much the better. And if the popular assent is not forthcoming? Then Hayek can blame the socialists, and say it is their fault for not understanding how good a deal they are offered."

"The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin’s centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money–fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else–including Milton Friedman–that the Great Depression proved that Say’s Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say’s Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did. My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough."

"[W]e have crossed a great divide, between what we used to do in all of previous human history and what we do now. Utopia, it is true, this is not. I imagine Bellamy would be at once impressed and disappointed. The economic historian helps explain why. ...With our increasing wealth, what used to be necessities become matters of little concern ...conveniences turn into necessities. Luxuries turn into conveniences. And we humans envision and then create new luxuries. ...He saw humanity on a hedonic treadmill: "...the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is a triumph of material wants over humanity." ...[T]his hedonic treadmill is one powerful reason why, even when all went very well, we only slouched rather than galloped toward utopia."

"[ Milton Friedman was] the dominant member of the so-called Chicago school of economics [during his tenure at Chicago]... The economics department increasingly reflected his approach and interests. These included deep commitment to the truth, appreciation of markets and free enterprise, frank and blunt discussion, and enormous zeal to convince the heathen. But most important was the commitment to economic analysis as a powerful instrument for interpreting economic and social life."

"I conclude by listing several main points of this essay: 1. Human capital is of great importance in the modern economy. 2. Human capital has become of much greater significance during the past two decades. 3. Human capital is crucial to the international division of labor. 4. Much unmeasured learning goes on in companies and by adults. 5. People need to invest in themselves during their whole lives. 6. Distance learning will become of crucial importance to the teaching and learning process. 7. Human capital stimulates technological innovations and the high-tech sector."

"[A] revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers."

"Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another."

"An efficient marriage market develops ‘‘shadow’’ prices to guide participants to marriages that will maximize their expected well-being. These prices, central to the analysis in this chapter and the subsequent one, are responsible for the more powerful implications found in these chapters than in traditional discussions of marriage. Some other approaches are evaluated in Chapter 4."

"The phrase ‘marriage market’ is used metaphorically and signifies that the mating of human populations is highly systematic and structured."

"The bumping of lower-quality men out of their marriages through competitive reductions in the incomes of higher-quality men continues until the incomes of the lowest quality men are reduced to their single levels."

"[Gale and Shapley assumed that each person has] a given ranking [among] potential mates that determines rather than is determined by the equilibrium sorting."

"Clearly, there is a great deal in Becker’s legacy to be deeply disturbed about. But there is also something about Becker’s approach I find bracing. A lot of people are greatly offended by the implicit suggestion in Becker’s work that decisions like marrying, or having children, are economic transactions like any other — no different than buying a car or a pair of shoes. And of course those are entirely different categories of decisions — in one sense. But marital relationships, parent-child relationships, decisions to marry and divorce, etc., are also profoundly economic acts. That can sometimes be hard to see, given the pervasiveness of sentimental claptrap about the family throughout American society. But Becker blasted through the Victorian detritus of all that bourgeois romantic ideology to analyze the ways in which marital and reproductive behaviors are fundamentally rooted in a utilitarian economic calculus. You could appreciate his general approach without necessarily buying into the details of his argument. That was a real contribution, and even a radical one, after a fashion."

"I think Gary's work is focused on outcomes. Sometimes people react to it because they don't like it as a description of the process. They think about marriage; they think about what they went thought when you got married, and they say it didn't resemble Gary's model. One doesn't think, "Was I calculating what my wife could get or could produce?" No one thinks about getting married in these terms explicitly. But the idea is that somehow those considerations are sufficiently important that they must be incorporated into the process. Moreover, you can test the model, so that if the theory is off, the data will let you know about it."

"You can see why Foucault chose him as the ideal interlocutor. No one saw and stated more clearly the biopolitical dimensions of modern economic theory than Becker."

"This Chicago-style approach, sometimes known as ‘Price Theory’ because of the fundamental role that prices often play, is exemplified in the path-breaking work of Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, Sherwin Rosen, George Stigler, and many others. Price theory has shed light not only on the most fundamental topics of traditional economics (e.g. consumption, saving, taxation, regulation), but also pioneered the use of economic tools in studying a wide range of other human behavior (e.g. crime and corruption, discrimination, marriage)."

"Paul Krugman is a very smart and very annoying person. Over the past few years he's been hammering away at political and economic advocates for austerity policies with unmitigated glee and derision. He does so with a brio and condescension that some people can find off-putting -- but that doesn't mean that he's wrong. … Look, I think Paul Krugman has a few policy blind spots. His method of argumentation alienates as many people as it attracts. But he's not wrong when he's talking about austerity. In his response, Michael Kinsley has managed to embody the conventional wisdom in Washington -- and in doing so, embody every policy caricature of Paul Krugman's worldview."

"As we ambled along, the sheer professionalism of our tour guide struck me. Her task was not an easy one. She had to provide a veritable font of Elvis knowledge to all of the intense devotees. At the same time, she also had to acknowledge the absurdist nature of the experience for of the rest of the tour group. With subtle changes in her facial expressions and slight adjustments in her tone of voice, our guide accomplished her task brilliantly. At no point in time did she diminish Elvis in the eyes of his devout followers. Still, I believe everyone left Graceland that day thoroughly satisfied with their visit."

"I voted last week, and everything I voted for was defeated. I voted for less police station money and against adding more courtrooms. The guy I voted for, a congressman, lost big time because he's totally anti-military. He wanted to cut the CIA budget! He's really cool. But he lost."

"America is a fucking police state."

"Did you know that the biggest—you know, the biggest star in the univer—in the whole galaxy/universe is as big as an atom is small? Did you know that? Isn't that wild? That's more pothead philosophy."

"People standing on escalators! And that is a testimony to human laziness! I mean, the guy who invented the escalator is just, probably, kicking himself in the ass. Do you think the guy made the escalator so people—and they're made like stairs—just so people stand on it so you go up and down? You're supposed to walk on 'em so you get there faster. You know? And then people stand on there. So every time Im on an escalator, I'm just like, "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me…." You know? That's my pet peeve, right there. And I'm gonna do something about it, and I'm urging you to do something about it! Write your congressman, get a group together, get together, and—I think we can do something about this."

"I do feel like, kinda like a misfit; usually I feel, inside, I'm a misfit. Like, I don't really watch sports, or a lot of…"

"It seems like our politics is so old, like, it almost seems like turning on the t.v. and there's ABC and CBS and NBC, and, y'know, there's like one newspaper in town, and so they're all pushing things on us, and that's all going away."

"Nick Gillespie: So, um, how do you self-describe politically? Krist Novoselic: I'm a, what, an anarcho-capitalist socialist…I don't know…I'm kinda a moderate, I think I'm moderate. Nick Gillespie: So you're an anarcho-capitalist socialist moderate. Krist Novoselic: I mean I'm a gun-owning pacifist, so there you go. I'm an anarcho-socialist—you know what I mean? Nick Gillespie: Anarcho-socialist— Krist Novoselic: —capitalist— Nick Gillespie: —capitalist, gun-toting… Krist Novoselic: Yeah, it's just like I, y'know, I just tryin'a, tryin'a make it work in this world and...basically I'm just a small-D democrat."

"Well, I think it just goes back to the values that I grew up with in the punk rock world because it was this decentralised world, and so we just made our own way—like we'd be antigovernment or, you know—but we really didn't complain a lot; we were more action-oriented, like, people were publishing fanzines, we were setting up shows, we were getting in vans and touring around, and we were associating with other people, so…y'know, I just like that idea."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be."

"A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"Yeah, I was a Democrat for about four or five years—active Democrat—and I thought I could reform the party; maybe I wasn't going about it right, maybe somebody can and somebody will, y'know? But I don't see it. It's just a top-down structure, it's a soft-money conduit, and, y'know, and like Nancy Pelosi, she's gonna lose the election again, and it's just like, what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing—wrong, wrong thing—over and over again. Republicans, they have a real big demographic problem, because they're the party of old white people, and they're not reaching out to folks."

"Well, it was just—it seemed like it was violence, and, like, 'cause I went by some of the stores that, like, I don't really eat at McDonald's, y'know, but a lot of people do, and so there are these people who want, y'know, they're-they're socialists but they hate people, y'know, so they go trash the McDonald's, and I just think it was just reckless violence, and they weren't tryin'a accomplish anything, and they said—he was writing something on the wall, some kind of graffiti that was just stupid and cliché, and I said, "Hey, how would you like if someone did that to your house?" and he yelled back, "Fuck you!" and these other people started yelling "Fuck you!" at me; I'm, like, "Oh," like "I'm in trouble.""

"Globalisation is a great thing, and the genie's out of the bottle; it's called the Information Revolution. It has a promise to bring opportunity and information to all corners of the world. It's a wonderful thing."

"If you hear a song you like, start dancing. That's what I do, I'll just start dancing, and that's it. That's all there is to it."

"We weren't really interested in those bands; we were—because we came out of this subterranean scene. And then Nirvana breaks big, and it's just diametrically opposite: we have, like, facial hair, and just, kind of, logger shirts, but we're all, like, "sensitive" and "feminine"—you know what I mean?"

"I own guns. I think they're a good tool to have out in the country, and I should be able to protect my home and my family."

"I like my guns. Yeah, because it just makes me more comfortable."

"I don't really like his [Ted Nugent's] reactionary politics. He's a lot like the people on the left, you know what I mean?"

"In his heart, Simon Yakida knew he was digging his own grave."

"Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time."

"It only makes sense in an academic culture in which transgression is by definition political and in which any kind of rage against society can be considered radical."

"I will say that the Muslim terrorists were practicing pure Islam, original Islam."

"Islam is the most antisemitic, genocidal ideology in the world."

"I believe most Muslims are secular. I don't believe that most Muslims subscribe to devout fundamentalist Islam by any stretch of the imagination. And we need the secular Muslims to win the battle for the reformation of Islam."

"Never, ever retract. The smell of weakness is like blood to sharks."

"Do not think for one second that what you do is not important. Do not believe one second that individual can't change the course of human events, because individual can and does and will change the course of human events."

"Dr. Shiva’s team found a sudden surge in duplicate ballots between 11-04-2020 and 11-09-2020. There was no mention of duplicates in the Maricopa Canvass Report. 17,126 voters sent in two or more ballots (duplicates)."

"By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check."

"In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful."

"It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder."

"The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible."

"Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company."

"Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, 'What am I not doing?'"

"Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all."

"Understand the problem. What kind of problem is it? There are three main types of problems: ‘Show that ...’ or ‘Evaluate ...’ questions, in which a certain statement has to be proved true, or a certain expression has to be worked out; ‘Find a...’ or ‘Find all...’ questions, which requires one to find something (or everything) that satisfies certain requirements; ‘Is there a ...’ questions, which either require you to prove a statement or provide a counterexample (and thus is one of the previous two types of problem)."

"Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but generally speaking at the graduate level or higher it doesn't. One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics."

"[P]rofessional mathematics is not a sport (in sharp contrast to mathematics competitions). The objective in mathematics is not to obtain the highest ranking, the highest score, or the highest number of prizes and awards; instead, it is to increase understanding of mathematics (both for yourself, and for your colleagues and students), and to contribute to its development and applications."

"For the third law.., Kepler had... 6 data points..: every planet.., the length of the orbit and the distance to the sun.., and he did... regression. ...He could fit a curve to these 6 data points and he got a square cube law. Amazing, but he was... lucky. That's not enough data to be... reliable."

"There was a later astronomer, Johann Bode who took the same data... and... had a prediction that the distances to the planets formed a shifted ... He also fit a curve, except there was one point missing, a... gap... His law predicted... a missing planet. ...[W]hen Uranus was discovered by Herschel, the distance fit... this pattern. Then Ceres was discovered... in the astroid belt, and it also fit the pattern. ...But then Neptune was discovered, and it was... way off. ...[I]t was a numerical fluke."

"Gauss... created one of the first mathematical data sets. He computed the first [~]100,000 prime numbers. ...He found a statistical pattern ...they get sparser and sparser, but the drop-off in the density was inversely proportional to the of the range of numbers. So he conjectured... the the number of primes up to x is... x divided by the natural log of x, and he had no way to prove this. It was a conjecture. It was revolutionary because it was maybe the first important conjecture of math that was statistical in nature. ...It just gave you an approximation that got better... as you went further... out. ...It started the field of... . ...[I]t was the first of many ...which ...started consolidating the idea that the prime numbers ...really didn't have a pattern, that they behaved like random sets of numbers with a certain density. They have some patterns. They're almost all odd. ...They're not actually random. They're... pseudorandom."

"Over time it became more... productive to think of the primes as if they were generated by some... random set, and this allowed us to make... other predictions. ...[B]ecause of this statistical random model.., we are ...absolutely convinced it's true. ...[W]e have, over time, developed this very accurate conceptual model of what primes should behave like.., but it's mostly and non-rigorous, but extremely accurate. It's the same reason we believe the Riemann hypothesis is true, and why we believe that cryptography based on the primes is... mathematically secure."

"[O]ne reason why we care about the Riemann hypothesis is that if... we knew it was false, ...it would mean there was a secret pattern to the primes that we were not aware of, and I think we would very rapidly abandon any cryptography based on the primes, because if there was one pattern... there are probably more, and these... can lead to exploits in crypto."

"I would be surprised... if someone at CBS wasn't thinking that eventually Johnny's gonna retire and if we have somebody in place, we'll be in good shape."

"Television people have put blinders on and they absolutely refuse—and movie people too—to admit that they can have any influence for ill in our society. You know the argument: 'We only reflect what's going on. We do not perpetuate it.' And yet not a week goes by in this town where there's not an award ceremony where they're patting each other on the back, saying, 'You raised AIDS awareness' [or] 'There'll be no more child abuse thanks to this fine show you did.' The argument is you can only do influence for good; you can't influence for ill. That makes no sense at all."

"A celebrity has just as much right to speak out as people who hold real jobs. This is America, after all, and you should not be precluded from voicing your opinions just because you sing songs, mouth other peoples' words on a sitcom or, for that matter, spin a giant multi-colored wheel on a game show."

"The most important political task facing the out-of-power party— the Democrats for now— is creating a villain to run against. It's certainly easier than developing some grand new ideas or policies on which to campaign."

"Sexual scandals are especially effective against Republicans who can then also be accused of hypocrisy inasmuch as they're always spouting off about morality and junk like that. Of course, some personal issues such as former Klan membership or leaving the scene of a fatal accident are off limits for obvious reasons"

"Political pornography is not unlike the sexual kind: difficult to define, but you know it when you see it."

"It's hard to get burned out on doing a TV show."

"You better go shopping for that dog."

"I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night."

"That was my nickname in high school."

"I had so many nicknames in high school I can't even begin to start the list right now."

"Pat Sajak, whose new late- night talk show is scheduled to go up against Carson, says he will eschew Johnny Carson's introductory monologue to avoid the "miilisecond" of "panic" he sees in Johnny's eyes after a failed joke ("The Good Fortune of Pat Sajak," by Diane K. Shah, Dec. 11)."

"“But my question is this, how did Pat Sajak gain authority over werewolves?” Pat Sajak smiled. “I could say it was dumb luck, like a spin on my show. Or I could say it's a curse. Or I could tell you the truth.""

"Neoliberalism is an ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. Neoliberalism tells you that you are valuable exclusively in terms of your activity in the marketplace."

"Hey Vsauce, Michael here."

"And as always, thanks for watching."

"The pyramids of Giza were as old to the ancient Romans as the ancient Romans are to us."

"Compared to what human life has mainly been like here on earth, our current societies are WEIRD."

"What I'm trying to say is... I'm not going to say, "I hate" anything I ever made — but I will say this: My mother is much more proud of what I do now than all of the fart-joke videos I did in the past."

"We are finite creatures. Our lives are small and can only scientifically consider a small part of reality. What's common for us is just a sliver of what's available. We can only see so much of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can only delve so deep into extensions of space. Common sense applies to that which we can access. But common sense is just that- common. If total sense is what we want, we should be prepared to accept that we shouldn't call infinity weird or strange. The results we've arrived at by accepting it are valid, true within the system we use to understand, measure, predict and order the universe. Perhaps the system still needs perfecting, but at the end of the day, history continues to show us that the universe isn't strange. We are."

"It's a truly eerie experience — because you can find the permanent location for any 3200-character text. You can find in this library the description of your birth, every possible description of your death, every poem, every joke, every lie — everything that could be said, can be found on this site. This … thing … blurs the line between invention and discovery; did you really discover or invent that thing, if it's description already existed? 105000 different pages are offered by the Library of Babel. In comparison, there are only 1080atoms in the observable universe. I searched for what I just said, and sure enough, in this hexagon, in this wall, in this shelf, in this volume, on this page, it's there. Hello. But deep down, we feel like there's a difference between this program, permuting something unknowingly and a person actually meaning it, intending it, saying it because they wanted to, with agency. We use a finite number of symbols to say things. For that reason, a library of every finite combination of those symbols can be made. But just because it can be made doesn't mean it has been said. That is the power we have. Perhaps you and I were born too late to explore the world and too early in history to explore the stars, but we were born at just the right time, which is pretty much all times ever — to explore language — to explore what can be said. What should be said? What should we send out to space? What, that can be said, will you be the first to say?"

"Skeletons are scary and spooky, but you know what else is? Teenagers."

"Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different."

"The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people."

"The relative peace of the last sixty years has been achieved only at the price of creating a university system which is an established church in all but name, and which suppresses any thought it finds even remotely disturbing."

"The most powerful people in the West today, measured strictly by their ability to influence the real world, are journalists and professors."

"When you create a category called "religion" which lumps together all the delusional traditions that people who are not like you have inherited unquestioned from their intellectual ancestors, you are making it harder, not easier, to question your own assumptions."

""Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

""Moderation is not an ideology." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

""The main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal [of formalism] is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

""Formalists attribute the success of Europe, Japan and the US after World War II not to democracy, but its absence. While retaining the symbolic structures of democracy . . . the postwar Western system has assigned almost all actual decision-making power to its civil servants and judges, who are 'apolitical' and 'nonpartisan,' ie, nondemocratic . . . In other words, 'democracy' appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

"Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner."

"Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself."

"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."

"[T]he ruling caste are the people who say "we" when they mean "the government". The ruled castes always say "they"."

"In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve."

"In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear."

"Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre."

"The New York Times could print nothing but lies for a year, and it would still be the most powerful institution in the world."

"You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape."

"Technical advances have masked, and continue to mask, the signs of decay that would otherwise be obvious."

"The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology."

"Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the state, etc., etc.—well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates", and nor would anyone else."

"Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery."

"In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal."

"Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought."

"The essential idea of leftism is that the world should be governed by scholars."

"That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is."

"All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press. None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government."

"[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement."

"[T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared."

"There is no institution to which one can go in order to receive a sound paleoconservative education. Most of the people in the idea trade would simply deny that such a thing exists. Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant."

"An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today."

"The genius of New Deal "liberal democracy" is that while it's somewhat liberal, it's not at all democratic. It is in fact designed specifically to resist democracy. The combination of this design with a civic creed that assigns unlimited positive connotations to the word democracy is simply brilliant. We may despise it, but we have to admire it."

"I can't imagine counting the number of times I've heard someone say "we should…" when what they really mean is "the government should…"."

"[U]niversal faith in progress is evidence for, not against, decline."

"The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government."

"A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies."

"In fact, rationalism is to reason as scientism is to science."

"[T]he modern world has largely replaced religion, defined as the veneration of paranormal beings, with idealism, defined as the veneration of mysterious universal principles."

"Limited government is a recipe for corrupting the judiciary."

"Since the ideal of limited government—that is, the idea that sovereignty cannot be the rightful property of anyone, individual, family, or corporation—has become general, we have seen an extraordinary level of violence, which appears to be connected to the question of who should control and receive the revenues of sovereignty."

"[R]evenue-maximizing government is not a medieval atrocity from the past, but a permanent feature of human history whose rare exceptions are unstable and undesirable."

"In fact, the word racism is applied in almost exactly the same way, by almost exactly the same authorities, as atheism in 1811. It is an omnibus epithet for a tremendous variety of ideas and opinions which responsible authorities find dangerous or displeasing."

"[T]he state is simply a real-estate business on a very large scale."

"[T]axation is not theft. Taxation is rent."

"It is a commonly held misconception that elected politicians hold any significant power in the current Western system of government. At best they represent figureheads around which power coalesces, and you can follow the power by following the name, as if it were a small and dusty bobber attached to a large and energetic fish."

"In the twenty-first century, any writer whose work appears anywhere but his own blog is a shill. Or at least, he should be assumed to be compromised unless proven otherwise. The Internet has all the tools you need to write and be read without being beholden to anyone. If anyone rejects this independence, you have to wonder why."

"The problem today is that the people who think they are the most daring are in fact the most obsequious."

"The artists of today produce kitsch because they're rebelling against a fictitious power structure by supporting a real one."

"For obvious reasons of human psychology, journalists […] are likely to favor political systems in which they themselves are more important and powerful."

"Most people in the West don't think their entire system of government is fundamentally, irreparably corrupt. Nor did most people in the Soviet Union."

"[T]he replacement of religion by idealism has allowed people who are essentially religious fanatics to achieve positions of unprecedented temporal supremacy, not only without arousing the alarm of reasonable, scientifically minded writers, but in fact enlisting their enthusiastic support."

"The secret of power is that power and responsibility are the same thing."

"In a democracy with a free press, the press is the government. Public opinion on any subject will naturally shift toward the opinions of those who explain that subject to the public."

"In the English language as we use it now, words like progressive and conservative are actually relative designations. Progressive means "left of the mainstream" and conservative means "right of the mainstream." When the mainstream shifts, these words have to shift as well, and the result is that many of the radical left-wing ideas of 1907 would be radical right-wing ideas in 2007."

"[T]he continuity of tradition from Plymouth Rock to the United Nations is quite unmistakable."

"[I]n a free society, there is no such thing as official truth."

"Journalism […] looks like an unfree market because it is tied so closely to the unfree market of higher education."

"[P]ower in a democracy is held by those who manage public opinion."

"[A]s long as the actions of two parties advance each others' interests, they can be considered allies, even if their philosophies of the world are so utterly opposed that they cannot afford the luxury of any such favorable reference."

"A common error […] is to identify tyranny and monarchy, which in fact are quite unrelated political forms—all they share is the coincidence of personal rule. We may not all know it, but we'd almost all rather live under the "autocratic" and "absolutist" tsars than under Stalin."

"[T]yranny is best seen as a sort of static civil war. The tyrant's office differs from the monarch's in that the latter's legitimacy is assured by law, whereas the former's is a matter of personal power and prestige."

"Tyranny […] is essentially informal and unstable. At least in the modern era, they tend to evolve into juntas, which tend to evolve into oligarchies, which tend to evolve into democracies. […] With each of these steps, legitimacy and internal security increase, and the state becomes stronger and harder to overthrow. Unless Gaza is your idea of fun, a strong and secure state is a good thing."

"Perhaps the principal error of modern libertarians is their failure to distinguish between weak government and small government. My ideal government is extremely small, extremely efficient, and extremely strong—its authority cannot be challenged. It does not repress its citizens not because it is physically incapable of repression, but because repression is, far from being in its interests, directly opposed to them."

"a foreign traveler in 1864 […] asked some random American to explain the war. "It's the conquest of America by Massachusetts," was the answer. Massachusetts, of course, later went on to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites as of 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945."

"Conservatives cannot admit that conservatism is futile, because then they'd have nothing to do. No man will willingly abolish his own occupation."

"[T]he problem with genius is not promoting it, but suppressing it. It takes a very large and intricate system to perform the latter task, but it works pretty well as you can see."

"[L]eftism is Protestantism and Protestantism is leftism."

"Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?"

"[N]ever trust a German when he tells you he's an atheist."

"Power corrupts not by repression, but by seduction."

"If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, […] the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it's a church."

"Academic politics is a murky and brutal game, and a small finger on the scales can steer it quite effectively, especially over time."

"I hope you can agree that the Harvard faculty in 2007 by and large believes in human equality, social justice, world peace, and community leadership, that the faculty of the same institution held much the same beliefs in 1957, 1907, 1857, and 1807, and that in any of these years they would have described these views as the absolute cynosure of Christianity. Perhaps I am just naturally suspicious, but it strains my credulity slightly to believe that sometime in 1969, the very same beliefs were rederived from pure reason and universal ethics, whose concurrence with the New Testament is remarkable to say the least."

"Cosmic righteousness and consistent, objective law are not just different things. They are actively opposed. Arbitrary rules whose derivation is entirely historical, but whose result is absolutely clear—such as property titles—are often the only way to define a consensus that everyone can agree on peacefully."

"This Rousseauvian idea […] that government is possible only when the governed love their governors has been responsible for literally centuries of bloodshed. It is killing people right now as we speak in Iraq. One hundred years ago, all sane people assumed that the purpose of the state was to enforce the law, not to be loved. The British governed half the world, with a much higher quality of service than exists almost anywhere today, under this theory, and did so quite successfully. When they were finally convinced to abandon it, […] the result was massacre, disaster, corruption, and poverty. Where would you personally rather live? In the Cairo of Lord Cromer, or the Cairo of Mubarak? The Basra of Gertrude Bell, or the Basra of Tony Blair?"

"I distrust all velvet gloves. Take the abstract ideals off and show us government as it really is. Law enforcement is not a bad thing."

"Surely, after the legal realists plunged us into a century-long nightmare of litigation and government by judiciary, precisely as its critics warned, we can see the value of legal formalism. Law is inherently objective and consistent because it is defined as such. If it isn't inherently objective and consistent, it is not the rule of law but the rule of men. Which we have far too much of these days."

"You get rid of the system by making it fashionable, among the most fashionable people, to believe the system needs to be gotten rid of. It is certainly possible to build a system of government that can withstand, in a purely military sense, the disapproval of its own elites, but such is not the case with ours."

"The system will be defeated when most intelligent people realize that The New York Times is a government gazette and Harvard is a government seminary, and when they form alternate institutions that fulfill the same role in a way that is genuinely independent."

"In any conflict between X and Y, there are three paths to peace. X can prevail, Y can prevail, or X and Y can agree to leave the battle lines where they are now."

"Ultimately, a pacifist is just an activist whose strategy for victory is to suppress the military efforts of his enemies."

"The problem with the permanent bureaucracy is that any enterprise controlled by its own employees tends to expand without limit."

"[T]he moderate ideas of one generation are the extremist ideas of its parents, and the whole system shifts gradually over time."

"[I]f you actually want to abolish politics, you have to deal with the existing power structure rather than the ideal form it pretends to be."

""Why, when, and how to abolish the United States", Unqualified Reservations (July 3, 2007)."

"A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it?"

"Stability is much underappreciated, especially by those who enjoy its benefits."

"[T]he law itself is arbitrary—a product of history, just like all other distributions of property. We support it because it's stable, and we like stability."

"The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power-struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear. The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't."

"All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system."

"[W]e have long since learned that offering any resistance to any kind of a mob is incompatible with our great American tradition of civil liberties."

"Someday Westerners will learn that what matters about a government is what it does, and what doesn't matter is the race, creed, color, sexual preference, or country of origin of its employees. Unfortunately, I suspect we may have to learn it the hard way."

"[P]lenty of perfectly stable and peaceful societies […] have been governed by a ruling caste which was culturally distinct from the body of the population."

"It is physically impossible to win a war by arresting an invading army and trying each of its soldiers."

"Iraq simply cannot be governed by a military effort, no matter how technically advanced, well-trained, and well-funded, that thinks of itself as a combination of a SWAT team and the Salvation Army."

"The Western world certainly has all the physical and human tools it needs to restore civilization in the Third World and resume the work of Lord Cromer. But it lacks the legal and political tools, and until it has those it shouldn't even try. As in Vietnam, it ends up just handing victories to its adversaries, who use the result as simply one more piece of evidence that demonstrates their invincibility."

"I'm quite happy to be an anti-intellectual, actually. It is the modern equivalent of anticlericalism, and it is long overdue. One can oppose specific institutions without opposing thought in general. In fact, sometimes it is even necessary."

"Everyone who spins a myth claims to be debunking one."

"[I]f there is any constant in history, it is that philosophers are very bad at predicting the future. Even when the policies they propose are followed, the results tend to be quite different from predictions."

"The charge that universities are directly responsible for almost all the violence in the world today […] strikes me as essentially accurate."

"[M]ost of the advances in Western scientific history, contrary to popular belief, occurred when scientists were not servants of the state."

"[T]he university, which was established as a refuge whose purpose was to pursue truth without regard for the opinions of the world, has become a power center whose purpose is to impose its own opinions on the world."

"[T]he tradition to which most sophisticated Westerners of 2007 conform is best seen as a sect of Christianity."

"Unless you are one hundred and seven years old and a veteran of the Austrian Landwehr, you probably associate democracy with peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity. Since I associate democracy with war, tyranny, destruction and poverty, we certainly have something to talk about."

"A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers. Since the former tend to outnumber the latter, a political formula is, if not absolutely essential, an excellent way to cut down on your security costs."

"Democracy means that popular opinion controls the state; intellectuals guide popular opinion; ergo, intellectuals guide the state."

"[P]ublic opinion in a democracy is a sort of funhouse mirror that reflects—albeit inaccurately, imperfectly, and often quite reluctantly—the views of the governing elite. To be fair, it also has a certain filtering effect which discourages some of the nuttiest intellectual fads, if only because they can be positively incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't been to Harvard."

"The permanent contest for political power that democracy creates is an extreme case of limited war, in which no weapons at all are allowed, and battle is resolved by counting heads."

"[A] free, prosperous democratic society is like a person who's so strong and healthy he can take a dose of arsenic every day—or at least, every four years—and still survive, sort of. The free, prosperous democratic society might be remarkably unfree and unprosperous compared to an undemocratic society that never took the arsenic, but so few of the latter survived the last two centuries that we have no basis for comparison."

"[T]he undemocratic, tyrannous societies are not those which failed to take the democratic arsenic, but those which took it and found it fatal."

"The temptation to reform, rather than abandon, the adaptive fiction is omnipresent."

"The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power."

"The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary."

"From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government, but what the government does. Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does."

"The reason it's so difficult to oppose lawful democracy is that we have so few alternatives to compare it to."

"One of the classical symptoms of decadence is that young aristocrats spend all their time on political scheming, and it'd be hard to say we don't see this now."

"Limited government simply has no motivation to stay limited. And so it doesn't."

"The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable."

"Corruption in Third World countries is a case of the formalist pattern trying to reemerge. A Third World government, far more than ours, is a system for distributing dividends, which even in the worst countries on earth are nontrivial. It is just a hellaciously intricate and absurdly informal system."

"The fact that governments are useful to the inhabitants of their territory is a purely secondary and emergent property. They need to be useful, because a government that does not provide at least basic security will not find itself with any rents to collect."

"Democracy was not a movement of peasants and artisans. It was a movement on behalf of peasant and artisans. Communism was not a movement of workers. It was a movement on behalf of workers. Civil rights was not a movement of African-Americans. It was a movement on behalf of African-Americans. If the only people who had supported these movements were the designated sufferers themselves, none of us would ever have heard of any of them."

"Conflict is an inescapable part of life. Uncertainty is not."

"Law is impartial by definition. If it's not impartial, it's not law."

"Fairness is unachievable. Any distribution of rights will be perceived by someone as unfair. If it starts as equal, it will not long remain so. If you try to set it back, you can only do so by breaking the law."

"The usual pattern is that tyrannies depend on supporters whose lawlessness they have to ignore, and whose depredations they are not powerful enough to formalize."

"Of course, since the government is sovereign, it can break its own laws any time it likes. But it will not do this unless it has a good reason, because the value of a lawless state is much lower than that of a lawful one."

"A good test for whether or not anything should continue to exist: if it didn't exist, would anyone invent it?"

"The only problem with colonialism was that it got nationalized. Which was enough. Colonialism chartered company–style is profitable. Colonialism as a government department is a disaster."

"For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army."

"Restore the Belle Époque!"

"History is a branch of literature, not a field of science."

"Progressives have created a vast set of puppet cultures which enable them to describe their monoculture as a multiculture."

"[F]ar from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture."

"The US military fails in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because it is operating under a doctrine designed to fail."

"If the US was a unified, effective actor which intended to conquer and civilize Iraq and Afghanistan, it would abolish the native puppet governments of Maliki and Karzai, place all lawless areas under martial law, create military formations with US officers and native troops, create civilian governments with US executives and native employees, and in general do what the British did in India, Egypt, Burma, etc., etc."

"Of course empire works. Conquest works. It has worked for the entire course of human history. It is not only effective, it is profitable."

"Yes, the US military should leave Iraq and Afghanistan. But it should leave not because it is impossible for a modern military to defeat a bunch of tribal warriors. It should leave because it is fighting an American civil war by proxy. One, this is just sick. And two, the right place to fight a civil war is always at home."

"Did you ever wonder why nationalism seemed so similar, right down to the names of the parties in, say, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam? What did Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam have in common? Certainly nothing that could be described as Algerian, Indonesian, or Vietnamese. Oh, no. What they had in common was that they all had friends—or, more precisely, sponsors—at Harvard."

"Men fight because they expect to win. Period. When they know they'll lose, they surrender."

"Who knows more about human biology? You, or James Watson?"

"In reality, progressives don't like actual Negroes any more than they like democracy. They have no love at all for the poor. What they love is to pick them up, turn them into feral barbarians, encourage them to devastate civilized society, and provide millions of jobs for themselves caring for the animalistic, burned-out shell of what was formerly one of North America's great cultures."

"If we want to end the era of chaos, democracy, and revolution, we need to deal squarely with the poisonous legacy of the Puritans."

"You are probably used to worrying about the crimes of your government overseas, but not in this way. You have an eagle eye for the crimes of the Defense Department. When it comes to the crimes of the State Department, you have the approximate visual acuity of the average snail."

"The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security."

"This is how Rothbard so frequently reasons himself from Lockean absolutes to sheer insanity. He is a master of the reductio ad absurdum, but so stubborn that he defends the absurdum."

"The root cause of terrorism is liberalism."

"[Y]ou don't want to be governed by a persistently unprofitable government any more than you want to eat in a persistently unprofitable restaurant."

"The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself."

"A sovereign should never make any concessions in response to violence or the threat of violence, unless there is no alternative but surrender."

"The free market isn't something that just happens. It needs to be designed and invented. The past is at best an inspiration."

"Economically, a fiat monetary system works exactly the same as a metallic monetary system in which the sovereign owns an infinite gold mine."

"The definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law. Its will is its own law."

"The righteous ruler has nothing to hide."

"To debauch a people, debase their currency."

"To a true libertarian, "classical liberalism" is a moral imperative, not a prudent policy. To me, it is just a prudent policy, and it is only a prudent policy in those cases where it does not turn out to be imprudent."

"How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it's being hysterical."

"Today's American has no idea what it feels like to live in an atmosphere of genuine public safety and order."

"Reaction is the reconstruction or restoration of the civilized mind, through political power, from any form of progressive or revolutionary degradation. In order to be a great reactionary leader, you have to have made your subjects more sane through the exercise of force—probably through the drastic, but effective, method of curing them entirely of politics."

"The way to do political, rather than cosmopolitical, economy is straightforward: consolidate the national balance sheet, treating the entire nation as a single corporation. Current account deficits then appear as losses. The notorious decay of nations which run a chronic trade deficit appears as a parallel with the notorious decay of corporations which run at a chronic loss. Similarly, the old mercantilist strategy of accumulating precious metals—much mocked by Adam Smith—appears as no more than the accumulation of retained earnings by a profitable polity."

"One of the many divine paradoxes in our political formula is the double valence of democracy. This word, its declensions, its synonyms, carry positive associations well up in the sacred range. Deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic. Yet at the same time, we have a related family of words, such as politics and its declensions, which seem to mean exactly the same thing—yet reek of heinous brimstone. How is it possible to have democracy but not politics, or vice versa? What can the two be, but the same thing? Yet anything democratized is made good, and anything politicized is made bad. Of course, to the hardened UR reader, this is just one more sign that we are dealing with an essentially magical belief system. I will defy any Republican or Democrat to explain this paradox. He can only fall on his knees and worship it."

"People think at least as much about breeding each other as they do about breeding animals."

"While there is no limited government, there is incomplete government; incomplete government means a vacuum made of anarchy; true anarchy is not even nothing, it is the billion tiny bubbles of local power we call crime; you don’t want to be anywhere near it; so, counting anarchy as governance, government power is absolute. A regime that tolerates crime has just chosen to share its absolute power with crime."

"The fundamental historical problem of the current period is why, though we can buy our ideas from any stall in a huge open-air bazaar, they all seem to come from the same manufacturer—exactly as if made in some cathedral. Yet there is no such conspiracy—and certainly no such agency. No person or institution is coordinating the party line."

"Objectively, an agency is official if it controls government decisions, or the government controls its decisions. A classic Orwellian state-controlled press is easy to recognize, even if the control path is informal—such as a financial subsidy. What about the other direction: a press-controlled state? ‘‘‘In the modern regime, government literally leaks power into journalism, by tolerating leaks: nominally unauthorized, but objectively permitted, disclosures of confidential information to the legitimate press. Leaking is both subsidy and control.’’’ … On Wall Street, selective disclosure of material nonpublic information is a crime… If the government enforced this standard on its own employees, journalism as we know it could not exist. … Putting these camouflaged agencies together, we see a Department of Reality which is unquestionably the center of power in our regime. No other agency can withstand it—certainly, no elected politician can withstand it. Sovereignty equals unaccountability, and our Reality Department is accountable to no one."

"As a people, we believe insane things, because democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. Its edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle, more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash."

"The basic grim truth that Americans need to face up to is that American successes and victories in the 19th and 20th centuries did not happen because of America's unique political system. They happened despite America's unique political system. America became great not because American democracy was great, but because America was a great people in a great place. As such, it was uniquely resistant to the poison of democracy, and alone survived its own disease. Now that the bloom is off the continent's youth, we can see how well American democracy works in a normal country. Others have experienced this disappointment; now, it is our turn."

"It was democratic power that executed Socrates; even lynching is a fundamentally democratic exercise of power. Lynching is mob violence; mob violence, unless the mob is an organized mob, is democratic violence. It is useless to pretend that mob violence was not an essential aspect of the American Revolution, for instance."

"The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilized high culture… Note that, before the coming of nationalist democracy, it was actually not a problem at all for wealthy, high-IQ people to live in the same society as poor, low-IQ people. It worked just fine. The latter served the former."

"When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism."

"And while not all the crimes in this tragedy (crimes of the 20th century) were committed by democrats, democracy is indeed its prime and ultimate cause. It is not a coincidence that the century of murder and the century of democracy were one and the same."

"A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation on a place and people once considered by far the most promising on earth. No mere ecological pollution could possibly compare."

"Politics can be defined as limited warfare. For example, you can see a democratic election as a form of civil war, in which both sides agree to settle the conflict by simply counting soldiers. While this is a long way from a war in which tank battles are legitimate but poison gas is not, the principle is the same, and no qualitative line can be drawn between the two."

"It is very difficult for a modern American to construct the history of the last 250 years as a history of decay. Decay is especially concealed by the obvious history of technical and scientific progress. While this has no reason at all to correlate with political or cultural progress, the two are certainly not hard to confuse."

"Thus, Anglo-American democracy causes the war (World War II), and its resulting terrors and destructions, because the nascent system of global suzerainty it set up in 1919 forces Germany to either accept a position which is permanently subordinate to the Anglo-American system or "international community," effectively sacrificing her independence as a nation, or demonstrate its disobedience by violently attacking that community. The dog has been backed into a corner; it must either cringe and submit, or bite. It probably should have cringed."

"As in the late Roman period, declining official authority, declining personal morality, and increasing public bureaucracy are observed in synchrony. This is not in any way a coincidence. The combination is an infallible symptom of the great terminal disease of the polity — leftism. Leftism is cancer."

"Our modern democratic elections are an extremely poor substitute for actual regime change. As we've seen, democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue. It is a degenerate neoplastic form. The only reason America has lasted as long as she has, and even still has more than a few years left, is that this malignancy is at present encysted in a thick husk of sclerotic scar tissue - our permanent civil service."

"Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant."

"If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia."

"Washington, especially since it governs not only the United States but also most of the world, is just too huge to serve as a good thought-experiment for government. It's easier and more fun to think in terms of California, if California could somehow be a sovereign state. Assuming security and responsibility, how could we produce effective government in California? The answer: find the world's best CEO, and give him undivided control over budget, policy and personnel. I don't think there is any debate about it. The world's best CEO is Steve Jobs. Which would you rather live in: California as it is today, or Applefornia? Which would you rather carry: the iPhone, or the Calphone? I rest my case."

"There is no reason at all that a libertarian, such as myself, cannot favor martial law. I am free when my rights are defined and secured against all comers, regardless of official pretensions. Freedom implies law; law implies order; order implies peace; peace implies victory. As a libertarian, the greatest danger threat to my property is not Uncle Sam, but thieves and brigands. If Uncle Sam wakes up from his present sclerotic slumber and shows the brigands a strong hand, my liberty has been increased."

"On a historical timescale, the practical effect of the sovereignty of the press is just to play yet another whack-a-mole game of quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchdog? In the end, this chain must logically terminate in a dog you just… trust. Sovereignty is conserved."

"Who is the sovereign? Not a who but a what. The sovereign is the story. Of course, there is no story without a storyteller. There are a lot of storytellers. Professionals, even. They make a good living and they’re all quite replaceable. I actually have great sympathy for the professional. In a bureaucratic oligarchy like ours, the professional both rules and is ruled. At the top, there is no one on top of him. Yet he cannot change his mind. He would simply be replaced. There are always younger, more eager professionals. Sovereignty is conserved; it is always humans who rule; and yet, it seems that no one rules."

"Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done? In the hands of an Augustus, for instance? Well, somewhere in Germany in 1933, there might have been an Augustus or two. Or even three. But Germany in 1933 was a democracy. And that democracy elected not Augustus, not Frederick the Great, not even Kaiser Bill. It elected — Wait. Who did it elect? Gee. I've forgotten already. I hate these migraines. An Austrian, I think. A sergeant? A private first-class? Someone like that. A man of the people, that's for sure. History is so confusing."

"Perhaps the easiest way for a modern American or European to understand Nazism is to understand that a good Brown thought about preserving the Deutsche Volk in exactly the same way that today's Greens think about preserving the Environment."

"One interesting case of an ideal shared by both the 1930s Nazis and the 2007 Progressives is the Environment. Nazi environmentalism was definitely a different thing from ours, but the family resemblance is clear, and although environmentalism was hardly the most important part of the Nazi program it perhaps provides a window into their worldview… Is it so impossible to imagine Environmentalism being used as the basis for mass murder?"

"Most progressives are socially normal human beings, who in any political environment, would just be choosing the largest, best-appointed bandwagon for their personal conveyance. In Nazi Germany they would be Nazis, in Russia they would be Bolsheviks, in the kingdom of Louis XIV they would be all for Louis XIV. This is one of the many reasons there is no need to guillotine them."

"It is not at all surprising that progressives hate corporations and the profit system. It is a natural consequence of the antipathy to order, the anarchism, the lust for entropic destruction, which is the foundation of their creed."

"Our lovely "mainstream media" is not, of course, a hierarchical organization reporting to the hidden Elders of Journalism. However, modern journalism is descended from such a hierarchical organization. That organization was the Office of War Information, OWI."

"(The United States’) industries are gutted and vanished. Her finances are ruined beyond imagining. Her old cities, but for a few, are dirty, dangerous, unlivable. Millions of feral, armed savages, perfectly de-civilized, run wild in her streets. Her famous social fabric is shredded, her famous voluntary institutions defunct, her population bored, lonely, atomized. Her small towns have rotted, turned into strip-malls, or both. (Her birds, however, are remarkably well-protected.)"

"The American, being human, being descended from a long line of chimpanzees and their still more foul hominid spawn, craves status, importance, meaning, in a word: power. But power is hard, oh so hard, to come by in his whip-broken, fixed and empty life of pleasant boredom. The solution? Oh, solution there is none, for power does not grow on trees. Power is here in America, as everywhere; power in America is locked up tight as Katrina van den Heuvel's ass. It's open to someone, perhaps, but not to him."

"America has only one problem: America is a communist country… Alas, this beautiful, simple, horrifying reality is simply too difficult for most Americans to grasp, let alone do something about. If you tell an American of any political persuasion that his is a communist country, the poor fscker (sic) will simply laugh in your face… If you love your American, don't let him get away with it! Don't let him wallow in his denial! Hit him straight in the teeth with a fast overhand right. "Of course America is a communist country," you can say. "You just have to translate. For workers and peasants, read blacks and Hispanics.""

"America has no surviving intellectual tradition besides progressivism — which is no more than a synonym for communism… Communism is as American as apple pie, and America today is a completely communist country."

"I date the Fourth Republic and the Progressive period to 1933. We can read this story in two ways. We can read it as the coming of modern, scientific government in the United States. Or we can read it as the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system — which, just for the sake of a catchy catchword, I like to call the Cathedral."

"In fact, we know exactly what Washington's policies twenty years from now will be. They will certainly have nothing to do with "politics." They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley."

"Competing branches of the US government still engage in Third World proxy wars, in which the Defense Department and its political allies and satellites (the Republican Party, the arms and energy industry, Israel) face off against the State Department and its allies and satellites (the Democratic Party, the NGOs and universities, Europe, Palestine). The true nature of these conflicts, which would end instantly if the US was under unitary leadership, or even if both American factions could agree to cut off all "aid" to all their foreign satellites, is admitted by no one. It is considered entirely normal that the US often arms, and always talks with, both sides of these bizarre, incurable pseudo-wars."

"Sponsoring murderous bands of thugs around the world has been, for the last half-century, State's (the U.S. State Department’s) job. It's a dangerous job. Everyone knows it. Obviously, they would like the thugs to be as un-murderous as possible. Especially toward their own people. And obviously, they do not see the picture through these glasses. They do not understand that the "men anywhere fighting" fight not because their grievances are unsatisfied, but because State itself has offered them the prospect of satisfaction through violence. State sincerely believes that the gasoline is water."

"One way to elect a new people is to import them, of course. For example, to put it bluntly, the Democratic Party has captured California, once a Republican stronghold, by importing arbitrary numbers of Mexicans. Indeed the Third World is stocked with literally billions of potential Democrats, just waiting to come to America so that Washington can buy their votes."

"I'll tell you what the real emotion behind the Arab Spring was. Actually, Beavis can tell you better. "Fire is cool," said Beavis. Fire is indeed cool. Americans were bored and needed some better CNN. They wanted to see shit burn. Shit indeed burned, and is still burning. Which was cool. So they got what they wanted. Not too different from the crowd in the Colosseum, just less honest about how they satisfy their very simple chimp/human needs."

"It is impossible to count the New Deal's crimes. The list must include everything short of mass murder. And even that is arguable."

"Until there's an election in which one box is a clear mandate for abolishing the New Deal, if not Washington itself, democratist conservatives are wasting time and annoying the pig."

"A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies."

"Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue."

"Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason."

"While the civil-liberties geek of 2013 is a pathetic and even hilarious figure, it's not at all true that his passion has never gone requited. Actually, in its bureaucratic form, "civil liberties" helps keep the streets of San Francisco covered with turds and shambling zombies."

"It's a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese."

"For quite some time in America it's been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants. Because America is a free country and that's what freedom means."

"If you taught chemistry at a university, you taught chemistry at a university which had a chief diversity officer, a department of African-American Studies, etc, etc. You knew what these people were. You knew what these people did. At least, you knew that whatever it was, it was not scholarship. You said nothing. What kind of servant of truth are you, sir? You served not truth, but the Party. Sign the form, sir."

"Because dependency is another name for power. The relationship between dependent and provider is the relationship between client and patron. Which is the relationship between parent and child. Which also happens to be the relationship between master and slave. There’s a reason Aristotle devotes the first book of the Politics to this sort of kitchen government. Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish friends. Their idea of Jews is straight out of Jud Süß. Our idea of slavery is straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you want an accurate perspective of the past, a propaganda novel is probably not the best place to start. [...] We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family."

"I don't think the conversion of Southern slaves into Southern sharecroppers made anyone much freer, because it created few practical options for the people involved. Before, you were an agricultural laborer who worked on the same farm for your entire life; after, ditto."

"If there is a germ of useful provocation in Moldbug’s posts—a glimmer of a productive idea that could be the basis of a discussion—those germs are more than vitiated by his sprawling, associative, and bombastically categorical writing."

"Not only does Moldbug know such iron fists would rule best, allow emigration, not cheat their investors, and never ever accept manipulator payola, he apparently knows this deductively, as a noble philosopher, not like data-addicted corrupt pansy social scientists. And he has no interest in improvements in the status quo below his philosopher-deduced-best pinnacle. What more can one say to such a person?"

"To be as mad as Moldbug is an artform."

"I regard Mencius Moldbug as one of the most important thinkers of our time […]"

"Mencius Moldbug's style is indirect, florid, and allusive, but […] he's essential reading."

"I am not a neoreactionary, but sometimes I think Mencius Moldbug is the greatest living political thinker."

"Moldbug is the most articulate and compelling reactionary I've ever read […]"

"Moldbug is good medicine for genuine progressives, who more than most have an obligation to think through their beliefs. It's strong and possibly toxic medicine, but having your thought congeal into mindless ideology is even more toxic."

"[H]is writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he's really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet."

"For all his faults, Yarvin is an engaging writer with a very dry sense of humor, bringing the pompousness of a Silicon Valley know-it-all to abstruse eighteenth-century European political thought."

"Worst of all, it [speculation of notable figures] provides fodder for the special educators, special education attorneys, ABA therapists etc. to legitimize their profits and to encourage the false hope and tears for toasted snow that so many parents of these children have."

"Most persons with an autism-spectrum disorder have never expressed their opinions on someone’s blog and never will. The neurodiverse often reach a vulnerable audience, as many persons on the spectrum have low self-esteem. Neurodiversity provides a tempting escape valve."

"It's [Autism has] prevented me from making a living or ever having a girlfriend. It's given me bad fine motor coordination problems where I can hardly write. I have an impaired ability to relate to people. I can't concentrate or get things done."

"But then I got fired from so many jobs, I ended up retiring and being supported by my parents."

"On my blog I attempt to dispute these notions by pointing out their failure to consider the long-term effects of autism on high-functioning autistics such as myself—let alone what should be done for the low-functioning autistics who cannot speak, or the “headbangers.”"

"But [not accomplishing] that does not stop me from wishing for a cure for future generations of children so they will not have to live like I have."

"Hopefully on my tombstone they will write, "We don't need no stinkin’ neurodiversity"."

"Usually, I was aware that other kids were bullying me, except occasionally when some girls in junior high… pretended to flirt with me and for a while. I did not understand they were making fun of me."

"One girl said I was like a Jew that sympathized with Nazis and I would gladly jump into [a] crematorium."

"Twiddling is one of my autistic things. I do it to calm me down. I twiddle frantically for a while, and I fantasize about all kinds of things while I twiddle."

"I don't have a visual imagination. Please, that trivializes my suffering. She [Temple Grandin] blows her own horn all the time."

"The presidential debates should offer the American people an opportunity to evaluate the candidates for president and make an informed choice about the future direction of the nation. The debate commission should respect the , but should not be used as a vehicle for stifling dissent and silencing voices when many voters conclude the two-party system makes them choose the "lesser of two evils.""

"Rules are made to be broken and exceptions can be made."

"Johnson (Gary) offers a principled voice for the libertarian philosophy, which has much to contribute to American political discourse whether we agree with every libertarian proposal or not. While I do not agree with the huge cutbacks in defense proposed by Johnson, I strongly agreed with his opposition to the Iraq War under President George W. Bush. While I would not agree with the full scope of his advocacy for the legalization of drugs, I agree with his support for the legalization of pot, his long-held view that the drug war has always been a fiasco and that drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one."

"I support Clinton (Hillary) for president because she is well-qualified for the office and would be a competent, skilled president and commander in chief."

"I do not support Trump (Donald), and believe he would be a disastrous president and ."

"Johnson represents a clear and coherent economic and political philosophy that conservative and libertarian economists can understand and support if they choose."

"Trump has no coherent organizing economic philosophy, spent decades acting like and supporting traditional liberal Democrats, has repeatedly shifted his positions on major issues and has little more trust from economists than he has earned among the general electorate."

"I agree with the libertarianism offered by candidates from former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to Johnson, and on other issues I do not. For example, I agree with the libertarian opposition to infringement on civil liberties in the Big Brother state that has grown with widespread eavesdropping from big government, and I agree with libertarians on their opposition to what is called the , and I believe pot should be legalized (and Jack Daniels should always remain legal!). I do not agree with the degree of laissez-faire advocated by libertarians in an economy that I believe is rigged by big business and their lobbyists and campaign donations."