718 quotes found
"Now how much do you think Microsoft Windows is worth? Don't answer! Wait until you see Windows Write, and Windows Paint, and then listen to what else you get at no extra charge: the MS-DOS executive, an appointment calendar, a card file, a notepad, a clock, a control panel, a terminal, a print spooler, a RAM driver, and can you believe it? Reversi! That's right! All these features and Reversi, all for just … How much did you guess? 500? 1000? Even more? No, it's just 99 dollars! It's Windows from Microsoft!"
"When we tell the story about what's happening today with browsers ten years from now, I want the thing that replaces Windows to be Windows. I don't want to wake up in a position one day where the guys at Netscape say, "Isn't Windows just that little thing that we use to put up menus and draw lines? Let's just write our own and suck it up into our client.""
"I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft."
"Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Come on! Get up, get up! Come on! Come on, give it up for me! Whoo! Whoo! Come on! Who said 'sit down'? I have four words for you. I. Love. This. Company. Yes!"
"We've had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is "stolen"."
"Most people still steal music."
"Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."
"I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."
"I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value."
"Developers, developers, developers (repeats many many times)."
"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance... Right now we're selling millions and millions and millions of Windows Mobile phones a year. Apple is selling 0 phones a year..."
"500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine..."
"[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum. … If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue."
"All the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android."
"You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phones."
"Let's face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That's why they've got 75,000 applications — they're all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone."
"Whatever device you use... Windows will be there. … Windows will be everywhere on every device without compromise."
"We are in the Windows era — we were, we are, and we always will be."
"I don't think anyone has done a [tablet] product that I see customers wanting."
"We like our model, as we are evolving it. In every category Apple competes, it's the low-volume player, except in tablets. In the PC market, obviously the advantage of diversity has mattered since 90-something percent of PCs that get sold are Windows PCs. We'll see what winds up mattering in tablets."
"Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware-software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch."
"Computer science is the operating system for all innovation."
"I think fully accepting that things are not the way they need to be, and going to work on those issues in a way that people understand you are serious about, as opposed to the tech industry generally appearing arrogant, I understand that."
"Is there fake news on Facebook? Of course there is. I could go right now on Facebook and say there’s an earthquake, Richter scale 7, in Washington, D.C. And should I be allowed to do that or should that be something that somehow Facebook has a way to control? I don’t know. I get how Facebook could control advertising. I don’t get how they’re a value proposition, which people – the world does like. I don’t understand how it works at all if you have no freedom of speech, even if you are saying things that are patently false."
"My dad said, "What the heck is software?" and my mom said, "Why would a person ever need a computer?" They said, "OK, OK, we hear you, but if it doesn't work out, you'll go back to business school right?" And I said "Right," and I never came back."
"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."
"Google’s not a real company. It's a house of cards."
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
"You heard of Hell—well, I was sent from it I went to it, servin' a sentence for murderin' instruments Now I'm tryin' to repent from it But when I hear the beat, I'm tempted to make another attempt at it I'm infinite"
"Caught up in bouts with the root of all evil I've seen it turn beautiful people crude and deceitful And make them do shit illegal for these Grants and Jacksons These transactions explain a man's actions But in the midst of this insanity, I found my Christianity Through God and there's a wish He granted me He showed me how to cope with the stress and hope for the best"
"I'm usin' smarter tactics to overcome this slum I won't become as dumb as some and succumb to scum It's cumbersome, I'm tryin' to do well on this Earth But it's been hell on this Earth since I fell on this Earth"
"Your ass forgot, so just in case you don't remember me I'll run your brain round the block to jog your fuckin' memory"
"I showered the slang, simple as ABC's Skip over the D's and rock the microphone with ease (E's)"
"I rock a beat harder than you could beat it with rocks"
"Don't do drugs."
"Brain damage ever since the day I was born Drugs is what they used to say I was on They say I never knew which way I was goin' But everywhere I go they keep playin' my song"
"What is life? Life is like a big obstacle put in front of your optical to slow you down, and every time you think you gotten past it, it's gonna come back around and tackle you to the damn ground."
"(imitating Norman Bates) Mother, are you there? I love you! I never meant to hit you over the head with that shovel!"
"I just remembered that I'm absent-minded Wait… I mean I lost my mind, I can't find it"
"Got bitches on my jock out in East Detroit 'Cause they think that I'm a motherfucking Beastie Boy"
"I want the money, the women, the fortune and fame That means I end up burnin' in Hell, scorchin' in flame That means I'm stealin' your checkbook and forgin' your name This lifetime bliss for eternal torture and pain"
"Slim Shady, Eminem was the old initials (Eminem = M&M = Marshall Mathers)"
"Extortion, snortin', supportin' abortion Pathological liar, blowin' shit out of proportion The looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict Half animal, half man"
"I like happy things, I'm really calm and peaceful I like birds, bees, I like people I like funny things that make me happy and gleeful… Like when my teacher sucked my wee-wee in pre-school!"
"I try to keep it positive and play it cool Shoot up the playground and tell the kids to stay in school"
"Remember me? I'm the one who burned your house down …But I'm out now And this time I'm coming back to blow your house up And I ain't gonna leave you with a window to jump out of!"
"I can't change the way I am… but if I offended you, good, 'cause I still don't give a fuck!"
"My brain's gone, my soul's worn, my spirit is torn The rest of my body's still bein' operated on"
"Shove a gerbil in your ass through a tube!"
"Okay, I'm done, I already came twice. You ain't gonna make me cum. I'm all outta gas, not so fast. Uh, your finger just went in my ass. Ow, that hurts, take it out now. Oh, wait a minute, aw. Put it back in, in, in, in. This don't mean I'm gay, I don't like men. I like boobs, boobs, boobs."
"Bitch, I ain't no fucking G, I'm a cannibal! I ain't trying to shoot you, I'm trying to chop you into pieces and eat you!"
"I will not ever perform in Poland, I'm still having bad memories due to Polish people in my city. I think that Poland shouldn't exist on the map, If I were Hitler, Poles would be killed at first, after them Jews."
"Maybe it's hatred I spew, maybe it's food for the spirit Maybe it's beautiful music I made for you to just cherish"
"See, I'm a poet to some, a regular modern-day Shakespeare Jesus Christ, the king of these Latter-day Saints here To shatter the picture in which of that as they paint me as A monger of hate, satanist, scatter-brained atheist […] While I'm wavin' the pistol at sixty Christians against me Go to war with the Mormons, take a bath with the Catholics In holy water, no wonder they tried to hold me under longer"
"Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment—would you capture it, or just let it slip?"
"His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy There's vomit on his sweater already—Mom's spaghetti"
"You better lose yourself in the music, the moment You own it, you better never let it go You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo!"
"This world is mine for the taking, make me king!"
"Like a flame in the night Like a ghost in the dark There's a ray, there's a light There's a hope, there's a spark"
"But you can't just stand there and try to judge It hurts but your jealousy probably tears you up inside as much And it's such a pleasure every button that I touch I treasure every glutton that I punish in my lust"
"With every artist comes the image he portrays and the picture that he paints"
"Oh, no. Not me, not Marshall. You want to see Marshall? I'll show you Marshall! I tried to show you art, but you just pick it apart"
"They took away my right to bear arms What I'm 'posed to fight with, bare palms? Yeah right, they're comin' with bombs, I'm comin' with flare guns"
"I don't rap for dead presidents, I'd rather see the president dead"
"Have you ever loved someone so much you'd give an arm for? Not the expression, no, literally give an arm for? When they know they're your heart and you know you are their armor And you will destroy anyone who would try to harm her"
"It hurts but I never show This pain you'll never know If only you could see just how lonely and how cold and frostbit I've become My back's against the wall When push come to shove I just stand up and scream: "Fuck 'em all!""
"Yeah, sue me!"
"And I am whatever you say I am If I wasn't, then why would I say I am? In the paper, the news everyday I am Radio won't even play my jam"
"And all of this controversy circles me And it seems like the media immediately points a finger at me So I point one back at 'em, but not the index or pinky or the ring or the thumb It's the one you put up when you don't give a fuck When you won't just put up with the bullshit they pull"
"And Dr. Dre said… Nothing, you idiots! Dr. Dre's dead! He's locked in my basement!"
"Will Smith don't got to cuss in his raps to sell records Well, I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!"
"A lot of people ask me stupid fucking questions. A lot of people think that what I say on records, or what I talk about on a record, that I actually do in real life, or that I believe in it, or if I say that I want to kill somebody that I'm actually gonna do it, or that I believe in it. Well, shit. If you believe that, then I'll kill you. Do you know why? Because I'm a criminal!"
"If I could capture the rage of today's youth and bottle it Crush the glass from my bare hands and swallow it Then spit it back in the faces of you racists And hypocrites who thinks the same shit but don't say shit"
"I make music to make you sick of fake music Hate music like devil worshippin' Satan music So say your prayers—your Hail Mary's and Jesuses Take two sticks, tape 'em together and make a crucifix"
"America! Ha ha ha! We love you! How many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful country of ours, the stripes and the stars for the rights that men have died for to protect, the women and men who have broke their necks for the freedom of speech the United States government has sworn to uphold… or so we're told."
"Yeah, you laugh 'til your motherfuckin' ass gets drafted While you're at band camp thinkin' that crap can't happen 'Til you fuck around get an anthrax napkin Inside a package wrapped in saran Wrap wrappin' Open the plastic and then you stand back gaspin' Fuckin' assassins hi-jackin' Amtraks crashin' All this terror, America demands action Next thing you know you've got Uncle Sam's ass askin' To join the army or what you'll do for their Navy You just a baby gettin' recruited at eighteen You're on a plane now, eating their food and their baked beans I'm 28, they gonna take you 'fore they take me"
"I love my fans, but no one ever puts a grasp On the fact I've sacrificed everything I have I never dreamt I'd get to the level that I'm at This is whack, this is more than I ever coulda asked […] It's like the boy in the bubble who never could adapt I'm trapped, if I could go back I never would've rapped I sold my soul to the devil, I'll never get it back I just wanna leave this game with level-head intact"
"20 million other white rappers emerge, but no matter how many fish in the sea, it'll be so empty without me"
"Entertainment is changin', intertwinin' with gangsters In the land of the killers, a sinner's mind is a sanctum Holy or unholy, only have one homie Only this gun, lonely ‘cause don't anyone know me"
"They say music can alter moods and talk to you Well, can it load a gun up for you and cock it too? If it can, then the next time you assault a dude Just tell the judge that it was my fault, and I'll get sued"
"It's all political; if my music is literal and I'm a criminal, how the fuck can I raise a little girl? I couldn't, I wouldn't be fit to"
"Music is reflection of self We just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail It's fucked up, ain't it? How we can come from practically nothing To being able to have any fucking thing that we wanted That's why we sing for these kids who don't have a thing Except for a dream and a fucking rap magazine Who post pin-up pictures on their walls all day long Idolize their favorite rappers and know all their songs Or for anybody whose ever been through shit in their lives So they just sit up and cry at night wishin' they'd die 'Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe We're nothing to you, but we're the fucking shit in their eyes That's why we seize the moment, try to freeze it and own it Squeeze it and hold it, 'cause we consider these minutes golden And maybe they'll admit it when we're gone Just let our spirits live on, through our lyrics that you hear in our songs!"
"I act like shit don't faze me Inside it drives me crazy My insecurities could eat me alive But then I see my baby Suddenly I'm not crazy It all makes sense when I look into her eyes"
"Sometimes you feel tired, feel weak, and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up. But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength and just pull that shit out of you, and get that motivation to not give up and not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse."
"Music is like magic: there's a certain feeling you get when you're real and you spit and people are feelin' your shit"
"My song can make you cry, take you by surprise At the same time, can make your dry your eyes with the same rhyme See what you're seeing is a genius at work Which to me isn't work, so it's easy to misinterpret it at first"
"Let the president answer a higher anarchy, strap him with an AK-47 Let him go fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way No more blood for oil We got our own battles to fight on our own soil"
"You find me offensive? I find you offensive, for finding me offensive"
"We're all we got in this world When it spins, when it swirls, when it whirls, when it twirls"
"But then of course everything always happens for a reason I guess it was never meant to be But it's just something we have no control over and that's what destiny is"
"If you could count the skeletons in my closet, under my bed and up under my faucet Then you would know I've completely lost it Is he nuts? No he's insane!"
"Nobody asked for life to deal us with these bullshit hands we're dealt We gotta take these cards ourselves and flip 'em, don't expect no help"
"A lot of people ask me where the fuck I've been at the last few years? Shit, I don't know. But I do know I'm back now!"
"Turn Halloween back into a trick-or-treat holiday Have Michael Myers lookin' like a liar Swipe his powers, replace his knife with flowers and a stack of fliers Hit Jason Vorhees with a 40 Stuck a suppository up his ass and made him tell me a story Gave Hannibal Lector a fuckin' nectarine And sat him in the fuckin' fruit and vegetable section and gave him a lecture Walked up Elm Street with a fuckin' Wiffle bat drew Fought Freddy Krueger and Edward Scissorhands too"
"I told the world one day I would pay it back Say it on tape, lay it, so that one day I could play it back"
"Had a dream, I was king; I woke up, still king"
"It's too late to start over, this is the only thing I know"
"And any fan of mine who's a supporter of his [Trump] I'm drawing in the sand a line, you're either for or against And if you can't decide who you like more and you're split On who you should stand beside, I'll do it for it for you with this: Fuck you! The rest of America stand up! We love our military and we love our country, but we fucking hate Trump!"
"This time around it's different, them last two albums didn't count Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushin' 'em out"
"When it rains, guess it pours—yes, it does Wish there wasn't any pain, but I can't pretend there ain't I ain't placin' any blame I ain't pointin' fingers, Heaven knows I've never been a saint"
"Like a 'Fuck You' for Christmas, his gift is a curse"
"I'd shoot for the moon, but I'm too busy gazing at stars"
"They call me Fire Marshall: I shut the shit down"
"Man, get these wack cocksuckers off stage! Where the fuck is Kanye when you need him? Snatch the mic from 'em—bitch, I'ma let you finish in a minute!"
"And love is evil ("evol"): spell it backwards, I'll show ya"
"I poured my heart out to you, let down my guard, swear to God I'll blow my brains in your lap, lay here and die in your arms Drop to my knees and I'm pleading, I'm trying to stop you from leaving"
"I fell for this so many times it's ridiculous And still I stick with this, I'm sick of this But in my sickness and addiction, you're addictive as they get Evil as they come, vindictive as they make 'em"
"Now get off my dick! Dick's too short of a word for my dick—get off my antidisestablishmentarianism, you prick!"
"Y'all are Eminem backwards: you're mini-mes"
"You don't get another chance, life is no Nintendo game"
"So spread the word 'cause I'm promoting my past until I'm passed out"
"All my life I was told and taught I am not shit By you wack fuckin' giant sacks of lyin' dog shit Now you shut up, bitch, I am talkin' Thought I was full of horseshit and now you fuckin' worship the ground on which I am walkin'"
"I'm beginning to feel like a Rap God, Rap God"
"Summa-lumma, dooma-lumma, you assumin' I'm a human What I gotta do to get it through to you I'm superhuman?"
"I make elevating music, you make elevator music"
"Ma, you're still beautiful to me, 'cause you're my mom"
"I'da flipped every mattress, every rock and desert cactus Owned a collection of maps and followed my kids to the edge of the atlas If someone ever moved 'em from me"
"They take your heart and steal your life And it's as though you feel you've died ‘Cause you've been killed inside But yet you're still alive Which means you will survive"
"It's true, I'm a Rubik's—a beautiful mess"
"I'm just a man, but as long as I got a mic, I'm godlike"
"Got my faith, where's yours? Do you still believe in me? Didn't I give everything I had to give you to make you see?"
"It's never too late to start a new beginning"
"This love triangle left us in a wreck, tangled [rectangle]"
"She does that thing with her lip, now she's melting me I'm putty in her palms, I'm wrapped around her finger A yo-yo on a string, she lets me sit there and just dangle Until something better comes along and she'll just drop me like a hot potato"
"Donald Duck's on, there's a Tonka Truck in the yard But dog, how the fuck is Ivanka Trump in the trunk of my car?"
"I'm packin' up my shit, as much shit in the car as I can fit And I'm just drivin' as far as I can get Away from these problems 'til all of my sorrows I forget What's tomorrow like? 'Cause tonight I'm startin' life again Get to the corner and stop, fuck am I goin'? Besides psycho when I fantasize startin' my whole life over"
"So finger-bang, chicken wang, w:MGK, Igg' Azae' Lil Pump, Lil Xan imitate Lil Wayne I should aim at everybody in the game, pick a name I'm fed up with bein' humble And rumor is I'm hungry, I'm sure you heard bumblings I heard you wanna rumble like an empty stomach I heard your mumblin' but it's jumbled in mumbo-jumbo The era that I'm from will pummel you, that's what it's comin' to What the fuck you're gonna do when you run into it? I'm gonna crumble you and I'll take a number two and dump on you If you ain't Joyner If you ain't Kendrick or Cole or Sean then you're a goner"
"These rappers are like Hunger Games: one minute, they're mockin' Jay (Mockingjay) Next minute, they get their style from Migos or they copy Drake"
"Kept my ear to the streets Signed Eminem, he's triple platinum, doing fifty a week"
"Hey, Em! You know you're my favorite white boy, right? I owe you for this one."
"Art is... a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation."
"Once when we moved away, She came to Romulus for a day. Her Chevrolet broke down. We prayed it'd never be fixed or be found."
"Rest in my arms Sleep in my bed There's a design To what I did and said"
"You gave your body to the lonely, They took your clothes. You gave up a wife and a family You gave your ghost. To be alone with me. To be alone with me You went up on a tree. I've never met a man who loved me."
"Oh, great intentions, Covenant with the imitation Have you no conscience? I think about it now Oh, God of Progress, Have you degraded or forgot us? Where have your laws gone?"
"He dressed up like a clown for them With his face paint white and red. And on his best behavior In a dark room on the bed, He kissed them all."
"But in my best behavior, I am really just like him Look beneath the floorboards, for the secrets I have hid."
"Tuesday morning at the Bible study We lift our hands and pray over your body But nothing ever happens"
"In the morning when you finally go And the nurse runs in with her head hung low, And the cardinal hits the window. In the morning in the winter shade, On the first of March, on the holiday, I thought I saw you breathing."
"All the glory when He took our place, But He took my shoulders and He shook my face, And He takes and He takes and He takes."
"Oh, I am not quite sleeping. Oh, I am fast in bed."
"Thinking Outrageously, I Write in Cursive"
""It's been a long long time since I've memorized your face."
"Words are futile devices."
"When I die, when I die, I'll rot. But when I live, but when I live, I'll give it all I've got."
"At least I deserve the respect of a kiss goodbye."
"Somewhere I lost whatever else I had."
"I know I've caused you trouble, I know I've caused you pain. But I must do the right thing; I must do myself a favour And get real, get right with the Lord."
"I want it all, I want it all for myself."
"I'm not fucking around."
"Ah, ah, Beautiful is the mother. Ah, ah, Beautiful is her son."
"Somewhere in the desert, there's a forest And an acre before us But I don't know where to begin"
"I forgive you mother; I can hear you And I long to be near you But every road leads to an end"
"When I was three Three, maybe four She left us at that video store"
"Found myself on Spencer's Butte Traced your shadow with my shoe Empty outline changed my view Now all of me thinks less of you"
"Some part of me was lost in your sleeve Where you hid your cigarettes"
"What's left is only bittersweet For the rest of my life, admitting the best is behind me Now I'm drunk and afraid Wishing the world would go away What's the point of singing songs If they'll never even hear you?"
"Well you do enough talk My little hawk, why do you cry? Tell me what did you learn From the Tillamook burn Or the Fourth of July? We're all gonna die"
"Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns to you somehow Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow"
"I am a man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands."
"I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head."
"There's only a shadow of me In a manner of speaking, I'm dead"
"Fuck me, I'm falling apart"
"Planes will crash, He'll never let you down. So maybe there's a crash coming for the ground, Seek His face, He'll never let you down. Worship grace, He'll never let you down."
"Did I make you cry On Christmas day? Did I let you down Like every other day? Did I make you cry On Christmas day? Did I let you down On Christmas day? . . . I stay awake at night After we have a fight I'm writing poems about you And they aren't very nice."
"If I miss my chance, I didn't even try I'm not one to regret Christmas in July."
"Since it's Christmas, let's be glad Even if your life's been bad, There are presents to be had."
"From the city of angels off the Pacific Ocean. Good morning, good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation, around the world. I'm George Noory. Welcome to America's most listened-to late night talk show, Coast to Coast AM."
"We're not talking about dead people, we're talking about the aliens; of their ghosts!"
"Almost sounds like Bigfoot doesn't it?"
"I wonder if Chupacabras are...baby Mothmen?"
"Well, with prophecy you got to see what happens."
"If they think their dead grandmother is visiting them at night, more power to them. They don't need me telling them (it's) true or not true. There are those few people who may challenge the facts and say some of the stuff may not be true. I say to them, "Chill out, relax and have an open mind.""
"We must choose between two paths. Either we conclude that Americans have lost control over their government or we reject this information as a mere distortion of history. In the first case we become advocates of the conspiratorial view of history in the later we endorse the accidental view. It is a difficult choice.The reason it is difficult is that we have been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories, and few people will risk public ridicule by advocating them. On the other hand, to endorse the accidental view is absurd. Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception."
"The so-called charity of collectivism is a perversion of the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan who stopped along the highway to help a stranger who had been robbed and beaten. He even takes the victim to an inn and pays for his stay there until he recovers. Everyone approves of such acts of compassion and charity, but what would we think if the Samaritan had pointed his sword at the next traveler and threatened to kill him if he didn't also help? If that had happened, I doubt if the story would have made it into the Bible; because, at that point, the Samaritan would be no different than the original robber – who also might have had a virtuous motive. For all we know, he could have claimed that he was merely providing for his family and feeding his children. Most crimes are rationalized in this fashion, but they are crimes nevertheless. When coercion enters, charity leaves.Individualists refuse to play this game. We expect everyone to be charitable, but we also believe that a person should be free not to be charitable if he doesn't want to. If he prefers to give to a different charity than the one we urge on him, if he prefers to give a smaller amount that what we think he should, or if he prefers not to give at all, we believe that we have no right to force him to our will. We may try to persuade him to do so; we may appeal to his conscience; and especially we may show the way by our own good example; but we reject any attempt to gang up on him, either by physically restraining him while we remove the money from his pockets or by using the ballot box to pass laws that will take his money through taxation. In either case, the principle is the same. It's called stealing."
"Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people's money; which, of course, is why it is so popular."
"The very wise and wealthy financiers of the world--going way back, even before Rothschild's time--have observed that the world was a pretty rocky place to live in, and that nations were always fighting over something or other, there was always somebody who was trying to conquer somebody else, and wars were universal. Too bad about that, but that's the way it is. So we--the bankers--found out that if we loan money to them that we'll get paid back - they don't question what the interest rate is because they're fighting a war! And if they can win the war they can just plunder the victim and pay us whatever we want out of the plunder - it doesn't cost them anything really. Then the issue comes up of what happens if one of these nations decides not to pay us? Ah! The answer is very simple: if they refuse to pay us back we'll finance an opposing nation, a revolutionary group somewhere else to become an enemy of that nation and attack it, and destroy it, invade it. We'll create another war, in other words, in order to get our money back, we'll finance this side to attack that side. And so, by financing all sides in a war, and keeping the world divided up into warring fractions so that no one unit is particularly stronger than the other, the banks can continue to finance all sides of wars forever, and always collect their interest, because they have the ability of putting one nation against another nation against another nation to collect their debts."
"We never really cared about all the things that other people cared about, you know? Like, people recognizing me on the street never interested me. I've always been kind of suspicious of the world, anyway, so it's pretty easy for me to live in my own little world."
"I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like."
"I was able to afford a car that didn't break down every five minutes."
"Actually I don't. I've never played with a bass player before, so I wouldn't even know. It wouldn't feel like it's missing, I just think it's normal … I prefer it that way so I only have to concentrate on Jack."
"It's in this book I was reading. Apparently, there's a little red demon dwarf that haunts the city, and before every major bad thing that's happened, it's appeared to somebody. Last time, he appeared in a Cadillac."
"We were like a moth right next to the flame. It's like, do any more and you go down. We were so tired. One final lap, and then have a rest."
"I wasn't brought up with any religion, actually."
"We've never had problems. We love each other, understand each other, and get past anything."
"A really unique feel and super heavy because of the space between the hits. Very influential on me as a teenager. I often think of her when doing certain kick and cymbal hits together. —"
"The White Stripes weren't all about Jack White's howling, ripping guitars, even if that's where the conversation tends to go in certain circles. The fact is, Meg White's minimalistic style was the perfect counter to Jack's shredding, a primal dynamic that gave their tunes that definitive garage stomp. Jack provided the flash, Meg provided the feel."
"This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago."
"Greed is all right, by the way. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."
"What good is the moon if you can't buy or sell it?"
"I think "immoral" is probably the wrong word to use...I prefer the word "unethical"."
"I played this game to win a championship. I am a champion, and I think The Bus’ last stop is here in Detroit."
"I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and I hate Michigan."
"He's always signing autographs, and I think he enjoys it more than the fans do"
"By the RIAA's terms, we commit piracy every time we share files on the Internet. In reality, the RIAA pirated almost all the 400 million CDs sold in America last year, since the people who made the music didn't get paid for them."
"I argue with lots of things, but I do not argue with my ears."
"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."
"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."
"Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him."
"What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?"
"Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed."
"This man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered."
"Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down to help with struggling and doing without and being colored all through blue Monday? Till way next Sunday?"
"right now I’m re-reading and re-reading Robert Hayden’s poems, which are absolutely beautiful and brilliant."
"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love..."
"Airbags are a lot of baloney, no matter what Allstate says or no matter what the DOT says."
"On occasion, people in power will sing a new tune once absolutely compelled to do so. In 1967 Henry Ford II declared angrily that if the government's safety standards were imposed, it "would shut down the industry." A decade later, in 1977, on NBC's Meet the Press, Mr. Ford recognized, "We wouldn't have had the kinds of safety built into automobiles that we have had unless there had been a federal law.""
"The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us. That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life."
"Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why."
"Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks."
"Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians — childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on — suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books."
"There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades."
"I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science)."
"Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.""
"Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. [...] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development."
"I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped, even with training, to use their feelings as psychohistorical research tools, although there is a whole new generation of psychohistorians just now beginning to write who are able to do so. To expect the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer [...]. Whenever I speak to a scholar of the emotional development necessary to make a good psychohistorian and get a blank look of total incomprehension, I try to find a way to leave the subject of psychohistory altogether. My listener usually is in another world of discourse where emotional reactions are not considered crucial to the results."
"Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad —the maddest of all being the historian's belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it —our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors."
"Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous."
"Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students."
"Most ethnologists scrupulously avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or eating of their siblings."
"As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms. [...] "This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed". Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he [L.L. Langness] calls this "love"."
"Anthropologists have concluded that "child abuse...is virtually unknown" in New Guinea."
"Although one anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful," they are not usually considered traumatic to children. Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn infant's heads for months to elongate the skull, or [...]."
"Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were."
"It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny and whitewash the record here uncovered."
"That dissociated selves were an everyday part of life in antiquity and the Middle Ages is a much-denied fact of historians, just as anthropologists deny that their subjects are dissociated personalities who live in an animistic world full of alters inhabiting animals, objects, and dead ancestors."
"But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes."
"You'll find my power comes from within.... and is a force to be reckoned with."
"Obviously my best strategy is to wait, listen, and learn."
"My name is Thanos, and my name means Death."
"Who would have thought that becoming God would be such a hollow victory."
"The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme!"
"There are forces at work you do not perceive. I weave a delicate strategy which rash actions could rend. Patience, please."
"Naked power is seldom the answer to any problem. Surely you must know that even this group's combined might is nothing compared to the force Thanos wields. Only a richly complex and skillfully executed strategy will insure your survival. Time is short and I have such a plan."
"We tried to do this the easy way — and we failed. Now begins the conflict I strove to avoid. It may well prove to be a battle the Universe cannot survive! Eternity, it is now your turn."
"Adam Warlock, a being who wished nothing more than to spend the rest of his days within the peaceful environment of the Soul Gem. He now possesses the Infinite Power and the responsibility that goes with it. While I, whose entire life was dedicated to the pursuit of power, now find myself scraping out a living from the soil. Irony worthy of the drama. Yet strangely enough though, I envy not Adam Warlock. Somehow I feel, that in the long run, Thanos of Titan came out ahead in this particular deal."
"I've made more money in novels than I did in my entire career in comics. The few years I did novels, they paid off so well, I don't have to be a slave to doing comics. But I'd rather do comics than novels. If I wanted to do it just for the money, I'd run off and do another novel. I just don't have the juice for it. I'm really not interested in it. It's a love for what this medium is."
"As big as an elephant is, a whale is still larger. Everything's relative. Even gods have their spot on the food chain."
"I’m still proudest of The Death of Captain Marvel followed closely by various Dreadstar stories, Warlock, Kid Kosmos Kidnapped, The Thanos Quest and a series next-to-nobody ever read, called Wyrd, the Mystic Warrior..."
"When I finished with Captain Marvel I had turned him from a warrior into a mystic. Adam Warlock was a mystical messiah. Where to go from there? Decided to reverse course and turn him into a suicidal paranoid/schizophrenic, which was the way I was feeling at the time. I’ve always used my work to examine what is currently going on in my own life. It’s cheaper than going to a shrink. The Death of Captain Marvel was a great way of working through my own father’s death."
"I’m a firm believer that in-depth subjects can be better handled in a fantasy setting. … Let’s face it, traveling to some far off land is a terrific way to break the mold, to do something different. Isn’t that why we go on vacations?"
"Just came from the premiere of Guardians of the Galaxy. With all the hype I expected to be a bit disappointed. It just couldn't be as good as everyone was predicting. And they were wrong. It's even better than everyone said. It just might be Marvel's best movie yet."
"If my aunt had a male appendage, she'd be my uncle."
"I think nobody really loves America more than black Americans, because black Americans loved America even when America didn’t love us back"
"...Everybody ran around like kids sucking on Pixie Stix having a sugar high. They were so excited, the Republicans. So what happens after your sugar high is you come to the crash. And the crash is where we are now, and people realize that John McCain didn't really know Sarah Palin when he chose her. And now that she's on the ticket, nobody has any real confidence that she's ready to be President."
"There's none of this wisecracking and cynicism that you see in … some of the other cartoons. He's supposed to be a role model for kids. He cares about other people."
"The essence of Gumby is that he makes children feel safe. He's their greatest pal."
"Clay is embedded in our subconscious. It has been there for at least 50,000 years."
"I didn’t allow merchandising for seven years after it was on the air because I was very idealistic, and I didn’t want parents to think we were trying to exploit their children."
"It’s so satisfying, and when you see it on screen, you feel like God because you’re bringing life to clay."
"Clokey says he underwent "a marvelous, life-changing experience" by taking LSD in supervised doses in the late 1960s. "It opened my awareness to what life is all about," he says. [...] — There's a master's thesis for someone who wants to hunt for the psychedelic influence in the shows."
"There are two kinds of genius, the imitable and the inimitable. "Gumby" is a work of the second sort, the thing so completely, singularly itself, so far off down its own road, so unpredictable and odd, bizarrely constituted and eccentrically executed that there's nowhere for anyone to take it, no variations to play on the theme. He is original and inarguable, and though he has gone in and out of fashion, been parodied and abused [...] whatever insults have been done him are only further testament to his iconic power."
"Cause I was born lonely down by the riverside Learned to spin fortune wheels, and throw dice And I was just thirteen when I had to leave home Knew I couldn't stick around, I had to roam Ain't good looking, but you know I ain't shy Ain't afraid to look it girl, hear me out So if you need some lovin, and you need it right away Take a little time out, and maybe I'll stay."
"All I know is that I'm young and your rules they are old If I've got to kill to live then there's something left untold I'm no statesman I'm no general. I'm no kid I'll never be It's the rules not the soldier that I find the real enemy."
"Cruisin on the grey snakes till my dyin day Checkin all the hen houses out along the way Wastin time and drinkin wine Life is short and I ain't lyin Livin all I can through every day."
"On a long, lonesome highway east of Omaha You can listen to the engine moanin' out its one-note song. You can think about the woman or the girl you knew the night before. But your thoughts will soon be wandering the way they always do, When you're ridin' sixteen hours and there's nothin' much to do. And you don't feel much like ridin', you just wish the trip was through."
"So here I am. On the road again. There I am, Up on the stage. And here I go, Playin' the star again. There I go, Turn the page."
"Out there in the spotlight you're a million miles away. Every ounce of energy you try to give away. As the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play. Later in the evening, as you lie awake in bed. With the echoes from the amplifiers ringin' in your head. You smoke the day's last cigarette, rememberin' what she said."
"He wants to dream like a young man With the wisdom of an old man. He wants his home and security, He wants to live like a sailor at sea. Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall? You realize you just can't have it all."
"That's why I'm going to Katmandu, Up to the mountains where I'm going to. If I ever get out of here, That's what I'm gonna do."
"So you're a little bit older and a lot less bolder Than you used to be. So you used to shake 'em down, But now you stop and think about your dignity. So now sweet sixteen's turned thirty-one, You get to feelin' weary when the work days done. Well all you got to do is get up and into your kicks. If you're in a fix. Come back baby, Rock and roll never forgets."
"Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy, Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy. Workin' on mysteries without any clues, Workin' on our night moves. Tryin' to make some front page drive-in news, Workin' on our night moves."
"I woke last night to the sound of thunder, "How far off," I sat and wondered. Started hummin' a song from 1962. Ain't it funny how the night moves, When you just don't seem to have as much to lose. Strange how the night moves, with autumn closin' in."
"Here comes old Rosie she's looking mighty fine Here comes hot Nancy she's steppin' right on time There go the street lights bringin on the night Here come the men faces hidden from the light All through the shadows they come and they go With only one thing in common They got the fire down below."
"In the pool halls, the hustlers and the losers I used to watch 'em through the glass. Well I'd stand outside at closing time Just to watch her walk on past. Unlike all the other ladies, she looked so young and sweet. As she made her way alone down that empty street. Down on Mainstreet."
"She stood there bright as the sun on that California coast. He was a Midwestern boy on his own. She looked at him with those soft eyes, so innocent and blue. He knew right then he was too far from home. He was too far from home."
"You always said the cards would never do you wrong. The trick you said was never play the game too long. A gambler's share. The only risk that you would take. The only loss you could forsake The only bluff you couldn't fake."
"I know it's late, I know you're weary I know your plans don't include me Still here we are, both of us lonely Longing for shelter from all that we see Why should we worry, no one will care girl Look at the stars so far away We've got tonight, who needs tomorrow? We've got tonight babe, Why don't you stay?"
"Some people say that love's a losin' game. You start with fire but you lose the flame. The ashes smolder but the warmth's soon gone. You end up cold and lonely on your own.I'll take my chances babe, I'll risk it all. I'll win your love or I'll take the fall. I've made my mind up girl it's meant to be. Someday lady you'll accomp'ny me. Someday lady you'll accomp'ny me."
"And I remember what she said to me How she swore that it never would end I remember how she held me oh so tight Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then."
"Moving eight miles a minute for months at a time Breaking all of the rules that would bend I began to find myself searchin' Searching for shelter again and again.Against the wind A little something against the wind I found myself seeking shelter Against the wind."
"Who wants to brave those bronze beauties Lying in the sun. With their long soft hair falling Flying as they run. Oh they smile so shy And they flirt so well And they lay you down so fast Till you look straight up and say Oh lord, am I really here at last?"
"Roll, roll me away, Won't you roll me away tonight? I too am lost, I feel double-crossed. And I'm sick of what's wrong and what's right. We never even said a word, We just walked out and got on that bike. And we rolled. And we rolled clean out of sight."
"My hands were steady, My eyes were clear and bright. My walk had purpose, My steps were quick and light. And I held firm to what I felt was right. Like a rock."
"And I stood arrow straight Unencumbered by the weight Of all these hustlers and their schemes. I stood proud, I stood tall High above it all. I still believed in my dreams."
"The way I solved the theoretical problem was to go into the shop and build something concrete."
"The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood. / Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. [...] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit."
"‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt. And never you cop another man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work. / Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.’"
"A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much."
"[About his legacy:] I'll be all right so long as it has been written on some corner of a human heart. On the heart, it doesn't matter how you spell it."
"Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser."
"[Chicago is] the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap."
"A man who won't demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking."
"I am the penny whistle of American literature."
"What country is there for a white man who isn't white?"
"Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lay down with a woman who's got more troubles than you."
"[About Chicago:] It's every man for himself in this hired air. / Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."
"You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. Compassion is all to the good, but vindictiveness is the verity Faulkner forgot: the organic force in every creative effort, from the poetry of Villon to the Brinks Express Robbery, that gives shape and color to all our dreams. [...] A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn't out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even. And, of course, neither will."
"The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources. The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York."
"To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below. Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards."
"We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves."
"Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable? If so, this is the truly American disease. And would account in part for the fact that we lead the world today in insanity, criminality, alcoholism, narcoticism, psychoanalysm, cancer, homicide and perversion in sex as well as in perversion just for the pure hell of the thing. Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder. Never has any people lived so hygienically while daily dousing itself with the ritual slops of guilt. Nowhere has any people set itself a moral code so rigid while applying it quite so flexibly."
"I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working."
"I don't know many writers. [...] Well, I dunno, but I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write. I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live, he observes."
"I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that geographically he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer. The thing is that here you get to be a writer differently. I mean, a writer like Sartre decides, like any professional man, when he's fifteen, sixteen years old, that instead of being a doctor he's going to be a writer. And he absorbs the French tradition and proceeds from there. Well, here you get to be a writer when there's absolutely nothing else you can do. I mean, I don't know of any writers here who just started out to be writers, and then became writers. They just happen to fall into it."
"Well, I haven't consciously tried to develop [a style]. The only thing I've consciously tried to do was put myself in a position to hear the people I wanted to hear talk talk. I used the police lineup for I don't know how many years. [...] I was just over on the South Side and got rolled. But they gave me a card, you know, to look for the guys in the lineup, and I used that card for something like seven years."
"I always think of writing as a physical thing. I'm not trying to generalize, it just happens to be that way with me."
"Living in a very dense area, you're conscious of how the people underneath live, and you have a certain feeling toward them – so much so that you'd rather live among them than with the business classes. In a historical sense, it might be related to an idea, but you write out of – well, I wouldn't call it indignation, but a kind of irritability that these people on top should be so contented, so absolutely unaware of these other people, and so sure that their values are the right ones. I mean, there's a certain satisfaction in recording the people underneath, whose values are as sound as theirs, and a lot funnier, and a lot truer in a way. There's a certain overall satisfaction in kind of scooping up a shovelful of these people and dumping them in somebody's parlor."
"[About whether critics have influenced his work:] None could have, because I don't read them. I doubt anyone does, except other critics. It seems like a sealed-off field with its own lieutenants, pretty much preoccupied with its own intrigues. I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of criticism this past summer at a writers' conference – into how the avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D. I saw how it was possible to gain a chair of literature on no qualification other than persistence in nipping the heels of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. I know, of course, that there are true critics, one or two. For the rest all I can say is, “Deal around me.”"
"Asked to name the best American authors of his day, Ernest Hemingway is said to have replied: "Faulkner. (Pause.) Algren.""
"OK, kid, you beat Dostoevsky."
"Algren makes his living grotesques so terribly human that their faces, voices, shames, follies and deaths, can linger in your mind with a strange midnight dignity. I join with Ernest Hemingway in hoping that Algren lives on, holds to his standards, and writes a long shelf of books."
"Two of his novels - A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man With the Golden Arm - and several of his short stories are now generally acknowledged to be literary triumphs. But all his life, Nelson Algren chose to walk on the losers' side."
"Perhaps Algren was our Cassandra: he was right when he argued for the significance of “squalor” and for the literary significance of the vast demographic of the dispossessed. The city was integral to what Algren observed and animated in his best fiction; thanks to Algren and a few others, Chicago framed American conversations about urban reality from the Thirties all the way through the Seventies and Eighties. [... Algren was] the most perceptive and humane novelist produced by Chicago in the 20th century."
"[Nelson Algren] may be the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying he may be the most serious. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day – indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue – the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours."
"Unlike Father William, Algren does not stand on his head. He just shuffles along. His appearance is that of a horse player, who, this moment, got the news: he had bet her across the board and she came in a strong fourth. Yet, strangely, his is not a mournful mien. He's chuckling to himself. You'd think he was the blue-eyed winner rather than the brown-eyed loser. That's what's so funny about him. He has won. A hunch: his writings may be read long after acclaimed works of other Academe's darlings."
"What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. [...] Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet."
"Recurring in all of Algren's work – novel, short story, poem – is the theme of the rigged ball-game. Offered in his unique lyric style, they are memorable."
"[Nelson Algren] is buried in Sag Harbor – without a widow or descendants, hundreds and hundreds of miles from Chicago, Illinois, which had given him to the world and with whose underbelly he had been so long identified. Like James Joyce, he had become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were."
"[Nelson Algren] broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently. [...] Reporting on what he saw of dehumanized Americans with his own eyes day after day, year after year, Algren said in effect, ‘Hey – an awful lot of these people your hearts are bleeding for are really mean and stupid. That's just a fact. Did you know that?’"
"His penchant for truth again shoved him in the direction of unpopularity."
"As I understand [Nelson Algren], he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off."
"It shouldn't surprise me that Nelson Algren, clearly one of the best novelists of his time, is not much read these days. It's the "kill the messenger" syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's works brings us is not good news: if the world he describes is at all like our own, then it's not morning in America, and it hasn't been for a long, long time. In an Algren novel or story, the only thing that trickles down to where most folks live is disdain, violence and sometimes, on a good day, benign neglect; [...]"
"He wrote brilliantly, especially in A Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man With the Golden Arm, which are, to my mind, his best, most artistically successful books. His language lasts: the voice of an Algren story or novel is unmistakably his, as permanently, flat-out American as Twain's and Crane's and more authentic than Hemingway's."
"Algren in person was a lot like his books – large-hearted, funny, angry, lonely. He spoke the truth to power wherever he met power (and he saw injustice where most people preferred to see only good intentions gone awry, which made him no friend to bourgeois academics and intellectuals: he trusted a brutal, racist Chicago cop more than a suburban Republican banker). To those of us who loved him, he could sometimes seem perversely self-defeating: he was unable to resist any chance to tweak the beard of somber authority."
"Algren's work was soon attracting attention for its unusual marriage of sumptuous prose and dry humour, describing a subject – the lives of those at the bottom – normally rendered in the dreariest of naturalistic tones. Algren's world, in one of the many phrases he brought into common usage (including "walk on the wild side", "monkey on the back", and "I knew I'd never make it to 21 anyway") was "neon wilderness"."
"[About his persecution by McCarthyism:] This is the Algren who would shortly be writing A Walk on the Wild Side: lost, heartbroken, trying to hold on to his belief that writing might still matter in a country as lost as America, and that he still has something left to write for his country, a patriot who knows he is now viewed as a traitor."
"Everything in Algren is transformed into a particularly American agony, comic and tragic, and he created an idea of a spiritually compromised America so potent that for some decades no one wished to know of it. In consequence, his aesthetics were not what the new empire wanted, and nor was his subject – the dispossessed – any longer of interest."
"Algren's characters fail even at failure. They manage to mismanage crime, vice, sin. Nothing is so worthless that it cannot be lost, and Algren's mean streets are revealed by the passing of time to be both as real and as allegorical as Kafka's courtrooms and castles. It is a hell, and it is the ultimate test of our humanity. / Like Chekhov, Algren believed a writer's role was to side with the guilty."
"The American dream was one of materialism, its hope that, even if you had lost everything yesterday, you might regain it today. Algren's dream is one of humanity: of how you might live a fully human life when you have lost everything and nothing can be regained – through humour, small victories and love."
"Algren's epitaph for Fitzgerald could apply equally to himself: "Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them. And so he died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin.""
"During Algren's childhood, America was a symbol of an ideal that could still seem revolutionary. For Whitman, a seminal influence on Algren, American democracy was a new event; for Algren, it is one more lost cause in a life devoted to lost causes, the greatest of which was writing, the act of which demanded you spend of your soul until there is nothing left but the prospect of death."
""Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America's traditions," Borges wrote. "Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville." And so too Nelson Algren."
"[Nelson Algren] was a type of loser we can't stomach in this country. [...] America has always been able to countenance beggars, short-con men, and nine-to-fivers who just can't get ahead, but we've never known what to do with the type of person who could have been really big but chose not to make the concessions required."
"Algren had his vices – he never did see a dollar that wouldn't look better at the center of a poker table – but it was virtue that unwound his life."
"For Algren, writing is not a trade or a hobby. It is a calling that requires practitioners give more of themselves emotionally than they can afford, and demands they tell the truest stories they possibly can, the kind that make the teller partner to the actions of their subjects, and create complicity in the telling. Everything else is just words on a page. In exchange for these sacrifices he guarantees no reward. Instead he promises commercial failure and the risk of emotional collapse, yet keeps faith with his vision and claims the other side asks more. They demand conformity."
""Thou shalt not get found out" is not one of God's commandments, and no man can be saved by trying to keep it."
"I insist that my positive knowledge, however small, is not to be set aside for the gentleman's ignorance, however great."
"While the group of real strategists at RAND probably never numbered more than about 25 people, the overall quality, in sheer intelligence and intellectual breadth, is simply astonishing."
"Well I certainly second that, I think in addition, well I mean other things I've written suggest reading a lot of history, and uh, clearly one of the things you want people to understand is the uncertainty of things. I mean, how you really have to look at a variety of alternative futures. Any notion that you know what's going to happen, I think is, not going to work."
"In fact, as we shall see in the next section, most attempts to explicitly measure military power are mere tabulations of forces of various sorts: the numbers of men underarms, the number of weapons of a given type, etc. This is in itself an evasion of the problem since it says nothing about the actual capabilities of the forces of one country to deal with another."
"Merely adding up all U.S. forces and comparing them with Soviet Forces, actual or potential, present or future, does not really tell one very much."
"On reflection, it is not even clear if military power is a transitive relationship. Until we have defined more explicitly how we are going to measure military power, it is not clear that if A is more powerful than B, and B more powerful than C, that A is more powerful than C."
"He is the kind of guy who attracts the attention of brilliant people and so when he was at the university of Chicago during World War II he was ruled ineligible for the draft because of a heart condition so he went to work in a munitions factory, actually weapons plant building bombers, parts for bombers but he was working with this metal shop at the university of Chicago and earn some money to pay for his education. In walks a guy who is working on his cyclotron and they haul off Marshall and he helps them fix fix it with order of magnitude improving in the cyclotron. He ends up playing bridge with a guy named Kenneth Arrow who ends up winning the Nobel prize in economics. It's one after another after another and it almost reminds you of the Forest Gump. You have this really smart guy who keeps bumping into all these fascinating people. And the other thing I guess that's quite interesting is he is sort of on the ground floor of some path breaking work on how we understand human behavior, behavior of organizations and there was a huge debate in the 1970s of how formidable the soviet union was. It was a big battle between Marshall and the CIA and he had the moral convictions to pursue that debate. In the end he was proven right. The other thing I would say, another reason we haven't heard a story he is terrible at self-promotion which is why we had to do the book instead of him. [laughter] but I used to kid and say you throw words around like manhole covers. These sorts of things but behind that sort of exterior masks a very emotional person and there are some stories in the book and I'd be glad to talk to you about them if you're interested of the deep feeling he has about other people, but the people he has mentored, many over the years and also about his country. I thought that was reflective of the other to the greatest generation."
"'For as long as I can remember,' I said, continuing to speak to the figure standing in the archway, 'I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it. All such heartbreaking sentiment, as usually considered, would seem to be on its knees before artworks such as yours, which so powerfully express what I have called the icy bleakness of things, submerging or devastating all sentiment in an atmosphere potent with desolate truths, permeated throughout with a visionary stagnation and lifelessness. Yet I must observe that the effect, as I now consider it, has been just the opposite. If it was your intent to evoke the icy bleakness of things with your dream monologues, then you have totally failed on both an artistic and an extra-artistic level. You have failed your art, you have failed yourself, and you have also failed me. If your artworks had really evoked the bleakness of things, then I would not have felt this need to know who you are, this killing sadness that there was actually someone who experienced the same sensations and mental states that I did and who could share them with me in the form of tape-recorded dream monologues. Who are you that I should feel this need to go to work hours before the sun comes up, that I should feel this was something I had to do and that you were someone that I had to know? This behavior violates every principle by which I have lived for as long as I can remember. Who are you to cause me to violate these long-lived principles?'"
"I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement -- anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know."
"What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours."
"To give a relatively common example, we might consider the plot of a traffic accident, an event that is commonly experienced as dreamlike in the beginning, as you find yourself suddenly moving along a track of time quite different from the one you knew before the accident began. You may be traveling along slippery roads and then, without warning, find yourself sliding across several lanes of oncoming traffic. You know in principle that such things can easily happen. They may even have happened to you on a prior occasion. You know that they happen to other people all the time. Nevertheless, this accident was not in your plans, which is why it is called an accident. It seems like a mistake, even if it could be explained by a cause-and-effect confluence of circumstances. It was a mistake because you had an idea of how things were supposed to be that day, as you do every day, and spinning helplessly in your car while others try to avoid a collision with you, perhaps unsuccessfully, was not part of your schedule. One moment you had a firm grip on things; the next moment you are careening toward who knows where. You are not filled with horror, not yet at least, as you spin along the pavement that is slick with rain or snow. At this point, everything is all strangeness. You have been taken to a different place from where you were, and you are no longer in control. Anything could happen now. That is the suspicion that creeps into your thoughts as a nightmare begins. Nothing is safe and nothing is off limits. All of a sudden something was set into motion that changed everything into that which was not meant to be, at least according to your deluded conception of your life and its “meaningful” trajectory. Yet these things happen, as everyone knows. They have always happened and are always happening."
"But we isolate the nightmare by calling it imaginary and denying it a place in our real life; we anchor ourselves in a place far away from it, where such “realities” as God and Country rule the wavelengths; we distract ourselves from it by confining our minds to places where it is not; and we sublimate the nightmare by placing it in stories and paintings and other devisings that we may put away at will. If we neglected to do this, we would be living at all times in a world of nightmare... a world that was not meant to be and yet is so. And thus we conspire with ourselves and against ourselves to deny the most obvious facts of the nightmare—death, disease, damage, and derangement. The horror story, by obeying the terms of the nightmare, is a way that, deviously, some people use to think about the unthinkable, to face what we otherwise would not choose to look upon, and, more importantly, to control and give meaning to that which can neither be controlled nor harbors any meaning. It is a perverted mode of defending ourselves from what would demean and destroy us, from what cannot be helped and should never have been—life itself in all its inane grotesquerie. However, for all our efforts to overwrite what has been written, to remake what had been made, to change what cannot be changed, and accept what is unacceptable, we have succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. No matter how many paper monsters we face down, no matter how many nightmares we shake off, the best we can do is open the pages of Poe and recite—with a resigned and sardonic calm, if we can manage it—those words from “The Conqueror Worm” that tell us a story in which there is “much of Madness, and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot.”"
"Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next."
"It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense."
"In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor's second-hand platitude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I've even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It's only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominately a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon."
"You lie in the bed, an arm full of tubes, a mind full of drugs, but still thinking. You see the figure enter the quiet room and you lift your arm and focus your mind. You ask the doctor, if it can be arranged, that your last day not be your worst day."
"We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell."
"The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world."
"Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page."
"Since I was a child, I’ve used my imagination to escape from life. At the same time, my imagination has plagued me with both reality-based anxieties as well as anxieties based entirely in the imagination, such as the fear of Hell I was taught to have by the Catholic Church. Paired with a talent for literary composition, a talent that it took me over ten years to refine, I became a writer of horror stories. To my mind, writing is the most important form of human expression, not only artistic writing but also philosophical writing, critical writing, etc. Art as such, especially programmatic music such as operas, seems trivial to me by comparison, however much pleasure we may get from it. Writing is the most effective way to express and confront the full range of the realities of life. I can honestly say that the primary stature I attach to writing is not self-serving. I’ve been captivated to some degree by all forms of creativity and expression—the visual arts, film, design of any sort, and especially music. In college I veered from literature to music for a few years, which is the main reason it took me six years to get an undergraduate degree in liberal arts. I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. Since my instrument is the guitar, I know every form and style in its history and have written the classical, acoustic, and electric forms of this instrument. I think because I have had such a love and understanding of music do I realize, to my grief, its limitations. Writing is less limited in the consolations it offers to those who have lost a great deal in their lives. And it continues to console until practically everything in a person’s life has been lost. Words and what they express have the best chance of returning the baneful stare of life."
"There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life — I repeat, everything — is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness."
"DISILLUSIONMENT CAN BE GLAMOROUS, an interview with Thomas Ligotti by E.M. Angerhuber (EMA) and Thomas Wagner (TW), January 2001 for The Art of GrimScribe"
"Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings."
"As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings."
"To be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive."
"The birthrights we toss about are all lies fabricated to a purpose, as any student of humanity can verify. For those who have given thought to this matter, the only rights we may exercise are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to perish from corruption or mortal trauma. This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has made it to the age of being reproductively ready, neither being a natural birthright. Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die. No other right has ever been allocated to anyone except as a fabrication, whether in modern times or days past."
"As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a 'brotherhood of suffering between everything alive' would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next — as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet."
"For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are— hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones."
"God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out."
"The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including “everything happens for a reason,” “the show must go on,” “accept the things you cannot change,” and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up."
"Some critics of the pessimist often think they have his back to the wall when they blithely jeer, “If that is how this fellow feels, he should either kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite.” That the pessimist should kill himself in order to live up to his ideas may be counterattacked as betraying such a crass intellect that it does not deserve a response. Yet it is not much of a chore to produce one. Simply because someone has reached the conclusion that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born does not mean that by force of logic or sincerity he must kill himself. It only means he has concluded that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born. Others may disagree on this point as it pleases them, but they must accept that if they believe themselves to have a stronger case than the pessimist, then they are mistaken."
"Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one?"
"Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture- one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce- rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists."
"Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species’ obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparkling Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by "human suffering," the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But these are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s "Last Messiah." It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgaps world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real."
"As a survival-happy species, our successes are calculated in the number of years we have extended our lives, with the reduction of suffering being only incidental to this aim. To stay alive under almost any circumstances is a sickness with us. Nothing could be more unhealthy than to “watch one’s health” as a means of stalling death. The lengths we will go as procrastinators of that last gasp only demonstrate a morbid dread of that event. By contrast, our fear of suffering is deficient."
"Not unexpectedly, no one believes that everything is useless, and with good reason. We all live in relative frameworks, and within those frameworks uselessness is far wide from the norm. A potato masher is not useless if one wants to mash potatoes. For some people, a system of being that includes an afterlife of eternal bliss may not seem useless. They might say that such a system is absolutely useful because it gives them the hope they need to make it through this life. But an afterlife of eternal bliss is not and cannot be absolutely useful simply because you need it to be. It is part of a relative framework and nothing beyond that, just as a potato masher is only part of a relative framework and is only useful if you need to mash potatoes. Once you had made it through this life to an afterlife of eternal bliss, you would have no use for that afterlife. Its job would be done, and all you would have is an afterlife of eternal bliss—a paradise for reverent hedonists and pious libertines. What is the use in that? You might as well not exist at all, either in this life or in an afterlife of eternal bliss. Any kind of existence is useless. Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relative potato-masher sense."
"We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along--a world where all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves. Left unchecked, this process will last as long as a single cell remains palpitating in this cesspool of the solar system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in nature's suicide? For want of a deity that could be held to account for a world in which there is terrible pain, let nature take the blame for our troubles. We did not create an environment uncongenial to our species, nature did. One would think that nature was trying to kill us off, or get us to suicide ourselves once the blunder of consciousness came upon us. What was nature thinking? We tried to anthropomorphize it, to romanticize it, to let it into our hearts. But nature kept its distance, leaving us to our own devices. So be it. Survival is a two-way street. Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet from outer space. It's the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us. Let it save itself if it can--the condemned are known for the acrobatics they will execute to wriggle out of their sentences. But if it cannot destroy what it has made, and what could possibly unmake it, then may it perish along with every other living thing it has introduced to pain."
"What meaning our lives may seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing. We may have memories that are unlike those of anyone else, but without the proper emotions to liven those memories they might as well reside in a computer file as disconnected bits of data that never unite into a tailor-made individual for whom things seem to mean something. You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody. The only matters of weight in our lives are colored by rainbows or auroras of regulated emotion which give one a sense of that “old self.” But a major depression causes your emotions to evaporate, reducing you to a shell of a person standing alone in a drab landscape. Emotions are the substrate for the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies as well as for the substance we see, or think we see, in the world. Not knowing this ground-level truth of human existence is the equivalent of knowing nothing at all."
""Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is.” You may become curious, though, about what happened to that painkiller should depression take hold and expose your love—whatever its object—as just one of the many intoxicants that muddled your consciousness of the human tragedy. You may also want to take a second look at whatever struck you as a person, place, or thing of “beauty,” a quality that lives only in the neurotransmitters of the beholder. (Aesthetics? What is it? A matter for those not depressed enough to care nothing about anything, that is, those who determine almost everything that is supposed to matter to us. Protest as you like, neither art nor an aesthetic view of life are distractions granted to everyone.) In depression, all that once seemed beautiful, or even startling and dreadful, is nothing to you. The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as a memory."
"This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it."
"To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I, too, am here.”"
"“We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.”"
"Also worthy of mention is a clique among the suicidal for whom the meaning of their act is a darker thing. Frustrated as perpetrators of an all-inclusive extermination, they would kill themselves only because killing it all is closed off to them. They hate having been delivered into a world only to be told, by and by, “This way to the abattoir, Ladies and Gentlemen.” They despise the conspiracy of Lies for Life almost as much as they despise themselves for being a party to it. If they could unmake the world by pushing a button, they would do so without a second thought. There is no satisfaction in a lonesome suicide. The phenomenon of “suicide euphoria” aside, there is only fear, bitterness, or depression beforehand, then the troublesomeness of the method, and nothingness afterward. But to push that button, to depopulate this earth and arrest its rotation as well—what satisfaction, as of a job prettily done. This would be for the good of all, for even those who know nothing about the conspiracy against the human race are among its injured parties."
"Whatever else we may be as creatures that go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it, we are meat. A cannibalistic tribe that once flourished had a word to describe what they ate. That word translates as “the food that talks.” Most of the food that we have eaten over the course of human history has not talked. But it does make other noises, terrible sounds as it is converted from living meat to dead meat on the slaughterhouse floor. If we could hear these sounds every time we sat down to a hearty meal, would we still be the wanton gobblers of flesh that most of us are now?"
"If human pleasure did not have both a lid and a time limit, we would not bestir ourselves to do things that were not pleasurable, such as toiling for our subsistence. And then we would not survive. By the same token, should our mass mind ever become discontented with the restricted pleasures doled out by nature, as well as disgruntled over the lack of restrictions on pain, we would omit the mandates of survival from our lives out of a stratospherically acerbic indignation. And then we would not reproduce. As a species, we do not shout into the sky, “The pleasures of this world are not enough for us.” In fact, they are just enough to drive us on like oxen pulling a cart full of our calves, which in their turn will put on the yoke. As inordinately evolved beings, though, we can postulate that it will not always be this way. “A time will come,” we say to ourselves, “when we will unmake this world in which we are battered between long burden and brief delight, and will live in pleasure for all our days.” The belief in the possibility of long-lasting, high-flown pleasures is a deceptive but adaptive flimflam. It seems that nature did not make us to feel too good for too long, which would be no good for the survival of the species, but only to feel good enough for long enough to keep us from complaining that we do not feel good all the time."
"In the workaday world, complainers will not go far. When someone asks how you are doing, you had better be wise enough to reply, “I can’t complain.” If you do complain, even justifiably, people will stop asking how you are doing. Complaining will not help you succeed and influence people. You can complain to your physician or psychiatrist because they are paid to hear you complain. But you cannot complain to your boss or your friends, if you have any. You will soon be dismissed from your job and dropped from the social register. Then you will be left alone with your complaints and no one to listen to them. Perhaps then the message will sink into your head: If you do not feel good enough for long enough, you should act as if you do and even think as if you do. That is the way to get yourself to feel good enough for long enough and stop you from complaining for good, as any self-improvement book can affirm. But should you not improve, someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. This is monumentally so if you are a pessimist or a depressive."
"Should you conclude that life is objectionable or that nothing matters—do not waste our time with your nonsense. We are on our way to the future, and the philosophically disheartening or the emotionally impaired are not going to hinder our progress. If you cannot say something positive, or at least equivocal, keep it to yourself. Pessimists and depressives need not apply for a position in the enterprise of life. You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin our fabricated world or stubbornly insist on . . . what? That we should mollycoddle non-positive thinkers like you or rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch? Or that we should go extinct? Try to be realistic. We did the best we could with the tools we had. After all, we are only human, as we like to say. Our world may not be in accord with nature's way, but it did develop organically according to our consciousness, which delivered us to a lofty prominence over the Creation. The whole thing just took on a life of its own, and nothing is going to stop it anytime soon. There can be no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no melancholic head-case is going to bad-mouth our catastrophe. The universe was created by the Creator, damn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are some bodies, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to be overhauled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not doubleplusgood and never will be. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a better future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. Lighten up or leave us alone. You will never get us to give up our hopes. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. We are not contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. Such opinions will not be accredited by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity. To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only "one of those people." So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line. If you are not as strong as Samson—that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then get loaded to the gills and return to the trap. Keep your medicine cabinet and your liquor cabinet well stocked, just like the rest of us. Come on and join the party. No pessimists or depressives invited. Do you think we are morons? We know all about those complaints of yours. The only difference is that we have sense enough and feel good enough for long enough not to speak of them. Keep your powder dry and your brains blocked. Our shibboleth: "Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness.""
"Opinion: There are no praiseworthy incentives to reproduce. For pro-natalists, children are only a means to an end, and none of those ends is praiseworthy. They are the ends of people who already exist, a condition that automatically makes them prejudiced in favor of existence. Yet even though these people think that being alive is all right, they are not at a loss to think of reasons why in some cases it would be better not to have been. They can only hope that their children will not be one of those cases, for their sake as well as for the sake of their offspring. To have a praiseworthy incentive for bearing a child, one would first have to prove that child to be an end in itself, which no one can prove about anything, least of all about something that does not yet exist. You could argue, of course, that a child is an end in itself and is a good in itself. And you could go on arguing until the child ages to death or sickens to death or has a fatal vehicular misadventure. But you cannot argue that anyone comes to an end that is a good in itself. You can only accept that someday he or she will come to an end that is an end in itself, which, as people sometimes say, may be for the best."
"...One must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise."
"If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us."
"Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, "The stopwatch has started." The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everyone until there are none of us to take care of. Then all will be as it was before we put down roots where we do not belong."
"The problem is this: Nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature."
"Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing."
"Somewhere along the line in human consciousness, there occurred self-consciousness. (When I use the word “self,” I don’t mean that there is a self or a center there.) That consciousness separated man from the totality of things. Man, in the beginning, was a frightened being. He turned everything that was uncontrollable into something divine or cosmic and worshiped it. It was in that frame of mind that he created, quote and unquote, “God.” So, culture is responsible for whatever you are. I maintain that all the political institutions and ideologies we have today are the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. The spiritual teachers are in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind."
"Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual, and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a nonexistent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these “permanent” relationships is the tomorrow—heaven, next life, and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in its undisturbed, permanent continuity in a “self”-generated, fictitious future. The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the repetition of the question, “How? How? How?” “How am I to live? How can I be happy? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow?” This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know, and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existences forever."
"Like every other emotion, fear is irrational; it is not subject to calculation and cannot be entered into philosophical equations. And whether or not you fear death has nothing to do with what some philosopher thinks is rational or irrational. Epicurus ingenuously believed that you could "accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us." While some people can short-circuit their jitters about speaking in public by repeatedly putting them selves in situations where they must do so, no mortal can practice overcoming the fear of death in this or any other manner. (This note need not be read beyond this point, the point having been made.) Rationality is irrelevant to our being afraid or not afraid of anything. Those who say that rationality has or can have any relevance in this regard do not know what they are talking about, perhaps most of all when they are talking about the fear of death. One reason among many for this fear is that we are perfectly capable of visualizing what it is like to be a stiff just like any other stiff we have witnessed in repose while loved ones wept and mere acquaintances checked their watches because they had places to go and people to see who had not been embalmed. This "being-towards-being-a-stiff," as the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger might say, is an unpleasant prospect, if only in our imaginations. Another ugly prospect, and one we will be around to experience, is the How and When of our dying. That philosophy is useless in tackling these ultimate issues is a sufficient, although not a necessary, reason for not bothering with philosophy . . . except possibly to distract or sublimate our consciousness with reference to the How and When of our dying. This fact goes without saying, which is why we do not often say anything about it. When we do say something about it, we say that dying is part of life and let it go at that. Naturally, nothing dictates that we need to fear dying, or nothing that we know of. There are many, many things that nothing dictates we need to fear, and the fact that few people are fearful of these things makes the point. Nothing dictates that we should fear becoming paralyzed below our necks. Nothing dictates we should fear having our legs amputated because they, or some other part of our bodies, might be damaged in a vehicular misadventure. Nothing dictates we should fear having horrible nightmares before we go to sleep or that we should fear waking up with an irritating speck in one of our eyes. Nothing dictates that we should fear going mad or becoming so depressed we want to kill ourselves. Nothing dictates that we should fear bearing children with cystic fibrosis or some other congenital disease. Nothing dictates that parents should have the least fear that their child might be abducted by a psychopath and tortured to death or that they should fear their child may grow up to be a psychopath who abducts children and tortures them for his pleasure because that is the kind of individual his psychology dictates he must be. Obviously and absolutely, nothing dictates that we need fear these contretemps or millions of others like them. If anything did dictate our fearing these things, why would we go on living? The answer is that if it were dictated that we should fear the millions of horrors that may befall us, we would go on living because we already exist. And as long as we exist, there will be a noisy klatch of philosophers haranguing us with reasons why nothing dictates we should fear death and why everything dictates that we should go on living."
"As for procreation, no one in his right mind would say that it is the only activity devoid of a praiseworthy incentive. Those who reproduce, then, should not feel unfairly culled as the worst conspirators against the human race. Every one of us is culpable in keeping the conspiracy alive, which is all right with most people."
"One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. From the studies of Krafft-Ebbing onward, we know that it is possible to become excited about anything—from shins to shoehorns. But it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT."
"As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I’ve read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti."
"The concept of leadership has an ambiguous status in organizational practice, as it does in organizational theory. In practice, management appears to be of two minds about the exercise of leadership. Many jobs are so specified in content and method that within very broad limits differences among individuals become irrelevant, and acts of leadership are regarded as gratuitous at best, and at worst insubordinate"
"We define successful aging as including three main components: low probability of disease and disease-related disability, high cognitive and physical functional capacity, and active engagement with life."
"When you’re 90 years old, you are somewhere near the end of your life; got to be... It doesn’t feel like the end yet, but statistically, demographically, there can’t be much left. But that’s not part of my daily baggage."
"Associated with each office is a set of activities, which are defined as potential behaviors. These activities constitute the role to be performed, at least approximately, by any person who occupies that office."
"The prescriptions and proscriptions held by members of a role set are designated as role expectations. ... The role expectations held for a certain person by some member of his or her role set will reflect that member's conception of the person's office and his or her abilities. The content of these expectations may include preferences with respect to specific acts and personal characteristics or styles; they may deal with what the person should do, what kind of person he should be, what he should think, or believe, and how he should relate to others."
"Each sent pressure can be regarded as arousing in the focal person a psychological force of some magnitude and direction. Such forces will be called role forces. This is not to say that these motivational role forces are identical in magnitude and direction with the role pressures which evoked them. Especially when role pressures are seen as illegitimate or coercive, they may arouse strong resistance forces which lead to outcomes different from or even opposite to the expected behavior. Pressures to increase production rates sometimes result in slowdowns. Moreover, every person is subject to a variety of psychological forces in addition to those stimulated by pressures from his role set in the work situation. Role pressures are thus only a partial determinant of behavior on the job. In addition, to the motivational forces aroused by role pressures, there are important internal sources of motivation for role performance. One of these stems from the intrinsic satisfaction derived from the content of the role."
"[A is] ... the simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures such that compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other."
"Overload could be regarded as a kind of inter-sender conflict in which various role senders may hold quite legitimate expectations that a person perform a wide variety of tasks, all of which are mutually compatible in the abstract. But it may be virtually impossible for the focal person to complete all of them within given time limits. He [sic] is likely to experience overload as a conflict of priorities; he must decide which pressures to comply with and which to hold off. If it is impossible to deny any of the pressures, he may be taxed beyond the limits of his abilities. Thus overload involves a kind of person-role conflict and is perhaps best regarded as a complex, emergent type combining aspects of inter-sender and person-role conflicts."
"Certain information is required for adequate role performance, that is, in order for a person to conform to the role expectations held by members of his role set."
"Social relations with one's work associates tend to deteriorate under the stress of conflict. In part, this reaction reflects the person's general dissatisfaction with the work situation. Attitudes toward those role senders who create the conflict become worse, just as do those toward the job and the organization in general."
"Innovative roles represent ... The intra-role conflicts of the innovator stem from his engagement and commitment to the creative, non-routine aspects of his job and his corresponding disinterest and disdain for the routine or uncreative demands placed upon him."
"Katz and Kahn's (1966) The Social Psychology of Organizations has been the most influential. It remains one of the most widely read texts on organizational behaviour. Katz and Kahn develop a perspective in which the systems metaphor is used to mediate approaches as diverse as Marxism, human relations and event-structure theory.... In the synthesizing of structural-functionalism with the principles of general systems theory, Katz and Kahn develop a process model for interpreting organizational actions in terms of input, throughput and output. Their thesis revolves around the notion that formal social systems are homoeos- tatic, possessing qualities of negative entropy, feedback, differentiation and equifinality."
"In the most general sense, organizational psychology is the scientific study of individual and group behavior in formal organizational settings. Katz and Kahn, in their classic work, The Social Psychology of Organizations (1978), stated that the essence of an organization is “patterned” human behavior. When behavior is patterned, some structure is imposed on individuals. This structure typically comes in the form of roles (normative standards governing behavior) as well as a guiding set of values. An organization cannot exist when people just “do their own thing” without any awareness of the behavior of others."
"Te reaction types used for functional group exchanges are collected into seven traditional categories [Acid-base reactions, Substitution reactions, Elimination reactions, Addition reactions, Nucleophilic acyl addition, Oxidation reactions, Reduction reactions]."
"I was reminded of how much I had misjudged the potential the profession would see in the time series rational expectations models. When I, as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) around 1970 did some work on the econometrics of rational expectations time series models, I felt rather apologetic about the extreme assumptions in the models. I did not expect others to regard them as anything more than a passing gimmick. Richard Sutch had just written in his MIT doctoral dissertation (1968) an exposition of the coefficient restrictions implied for time series representations of long-term and short-term interest rates, but he never bothered to publish this work. I remember conversations with him and others about rational expectations models, and I did not come away thinking they were the wave of the future."
"To understand the economy then is to comprehend how it is driven by the animal spirits. Just as Adam Smith’s invisible hand is the keynote of classical economics, Keynes’ animal spirits are the keynote to a different view of the economy — a view that explains the underlying instabilities of capitalism."
"This [covariance] is something that is not in the habit of thinking of most amateur investors. They look at their investments one at a time, and they don't, you always have to go back and say, what's the covariance? That's what really matters for what happen to your portfolio. Because when you invest in a lot of companies that are all the same, you're asking for trouble, because the whole thing is going to either blow up or succeed. And you can't live like that. You have to be looking for low covariance."
"What kind of a society is this where a person can’t express attraction without fearing that they’re going to be murdered for it? If the person who came out with the secret was a Jewish woman or a black woman or an Asian woman, and he went over to her house the next day and killed her because he was so repulsed and she had embarrassed him that way on national television, nobody would be writing stories on the TV show’s responsibility. Everyone would be writing stories about this racist, this anti-Semite."
"Pat Buchanan is a walking, living, breathing hate crime waiting to happen."
"Buchanan is worse than a child playing with matches because he understands the dangerous impact of what he says."
"It's going to be a heartbreaking moment for these couples, to come face to face with this discrimination against them."
"When dealing with the press the most important thing to remember is that you have the right to remain silent, because everything you say can and will be used against you."
"Never repeat the words of your enemy. When you do, their words are heard twice and yours only once."
"I always return the bible to the front desk when I stay in a hotel. I’m not welcome in their house of worship and they’re certainly not welcome in mine."
"In a debate on “gay” marriage, the opponent said “Next thing you’ll be marrying horses!” Jeff responded, “Well, at least I’d be in a stable relationship!”"
"We think this issue needs to matter to anyone who believes in true equal opportunity and justice. If we learned anything from our experience with the Proposal 2 battle, it's that these attempts to allow discrimination in Michigan must be stopped and a united effort by many communities is the only hope to stop them."
"This guy looks pretty gay to me. I'm willing to believe they didn't intend it to be a gay man, but I don't believe they're shocked someone would draw that conclusion."
"John Ashcroft is not a friend of liberty and justice. George Bush, the appointed president, is not someone who ---prior to a month ago--- ever demonstrated any insight or acuity about the world around him. Have these men been born again, again?"
"And let's not make any mistake, or gloss over that fact: Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are at risk every day of their lives. Not only are we the group most at risk of violence, we are most at risk of job discrimination, losing our families; homophobia retains its title as the last socially acceptable form of bigotry."
"“Gay panic” is insidious. It appeals to juries, who are allegedly made up of random members of the community. What defense lawyers know is that most people are repulsed by the idea of gay —especially gay male— sex. Those lawyers know that a claim of defense against an alleged gay sexual advance will win points with the jury of peers."
"GLBT people across this country only want equality and to be left alone, left to pursue our dreams and aspirations and our part of the American promise, which should be our birthright."
"We can not live as disposable people. The broader community, which has firmly established compulsory heterosexuality as the law of the universe, has to get over its problem with us."
"Anti-GLBT sentiment is a primary tool for organizing the far-right and it is stronger then ever as a means to split communities and reinforce constituencies."
"While it is all too true that there is no single monolithic voice or unified agreement about what it means to be GLBT-identified, this “GLBT community” has been able to unite behind some basic consensus of what we need to achieve in order to claim the right of full citizenship."
"Is it any wonder that those who attack us feel they have a license to do so? A license to kill? Police won't investigate. Juries won't convict. The public still thinks our lives are a political issue, defined by the mythic "Gay Agenda.""
"We want to be able to move freely and safely in our daily lives, free from the threat of random hate violence.themselves by turning the Constitution on its head and claim protection and permission to demonize and denigrate us. Hiding behind the perversion of the concepts of religious freedom and political speech, those people have carved out a special right to impose their bigotry and hatred for us."
"America… You Kill Me! America kills all of us."
"Our call to people of goodwill and justice, and especially to all gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people, and those who support and love us —our allies in the fight for liberty and justice for all— is to take action."
"As new generations of activists come forward with new ideas and sensibilities; as the political landscape evolves and changes; as new technologies are born and developed; and as the mercurial focus of issues present new concerns and dangers… Our strength, creativity, harnessed rage and effective activism will remain constant and be the root source of our salvation in the future."
"Matthew Shepard should be a symbol. But it misses the point if it ends only with legislation. It misses the point if it’s about mere tolerance."
"Matt’s murder is a parable for our times. It tells of what happens to the conscience of the country when it fails to be free for all and accord every person dignity. How we consume and destroy our children…our future."
"We want to be able to freely associate, without fear that our privacy, including the privacy of our intimate consensual relations, will be compromised by intrusive and abusive selective enforcement of laws or moral codes. We want to be able to live with the person we choose in legally sanctioned arrangements or marriage, to be able to build and maintain families and raise children, with the full protections and benefits that attain to those relationships. We want GLBT youth to have access to safe and inclusive education experiences, in both public and private educational institutions, no longer dispirited by judgmental, prejudicial systems that contribute to low self-esteem and leave them at risk. These are the basic rights and expectations yet to be achieved for GLBT people in this land of the free."
"But the cards are stacked against us. Scurrilous and abusive rhetoric is spewed by politicians and so-called religious leaders, who cloak themselves by turning the Constitution on its head and claim protection and permission to demonize and denigrate us. Hiding behind the perversion of the concepts of religious freedom and political speech, those people have carved out a special right to impose their bigotry and hatred for us."
"I know many words will doubtless be written about Jeff, but none can convey the depth of loss – personal loss and loss to our movements – felt at Jeff’s death. Jeff was a brilliant strategist, a remarkable teacher, a powerful leader, and, above all, my friend. For all the ferocity of his refusal to let others suffer harm, Jeff was a gentle soul. He cared deeply for those he served for so long, speaking out for human rights for almost three decades through his advocacy against violence, homelessness, HIV, and the recognition of the diversity of family, sex and sexuality. Every word spoken for freedom, every statement demanding human rights – the right to love as we wish and be who we are – will forever summon Jeff to our minds and hearts. Our hearts go out to all the members of his family, and that includes the hundreds and thousands of lives made better because Jeff lived and because Jeff cared enough to create the change he wanted to see."
"LGBT Detroit is deeply saddened by the loss of Jeffrey Montgomery, a friend who I passionately refer to as Jeff. Jeff was a monumental force in the advocacy and safety of LGBTQ Detroiters, Michiganders, and Americans as a whole. His work on behalf of those who were affected by violence and profiling improved the quality of life for many LGBTQ people. Jeff will be remembered for his tireless compassion for others, as well as his passion to advance the lives of many. We will remember Jeff through many avenues, including the work that continues to be done by our sister partner, Equality Michigan. Jeff was an inspiration to myself and many others; we lost a large figure in the movement for the equality of LGBTQ people. He will be missed immensely."
"I met Jeff when I was coming into the LGBT equality movement as a young activist. I was impressed with his passion and dedication. He introduced me to so many folks who I continue to work with and call friends. Jeff will be missed. The movement lost a champion who helped lay the foundation on which many of our achievements are now built."
"I'm so sorry to hear of Jeff's passing. He laid the groundwork in so many ways for the LGBTQ advocacy taking place across Michigan still today. He will be missed by many, though his legacy will live on through those he inspired throughout his life."
"He did so much for human rights in Michigan. So sad."
"Jeff was a true pioneer who made the world a much better place."
"No other local activist for LGBTQ rights and sexual freedom from the past twenty-five years has had the potent impact on our history as Jeffrey Montgomery."
"His unflagging devotion to queer justice and social justice will be a model for generations to come."
"Management cannot provide a man with self-respect or with the respect of his fellows or with the satisfaction of needs for self-fulfillment. It can create conditions such that he is encouraged and enabled to seek such satisfactions for himself, or it can thwart him by failing to create those conditions."
"The key question for top management is what are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?"
"Every managerial act rests on assumptions, generalizations, and hypotheses — that is to say, on theory. Our assumptions are frequently implicit, sometimes quite unconscious, often conflicting; nevertheless, they determine our predictions that if we do a, b will occur. Theory and practice are inseparable."
"Human behavior is predictable, but, as in physical science, accurate prediction hinges on the correctness of underlying theoretical assumptions. There is, in fact, no prediction without theory; all managerial decisions and actions rest on assumptions about behavior. If we adopt the posture of the ostrich with respect to our assumptions under the mistaken idea that we are thus “being ‘practical,” or that “management is an art,” our progress with respect to the human side of enterprise will indeed be slow. Only as we examine and test our theoretical assumptions can we hope to make them more adequate, to remove inconsistencies, and thus to improve our ability to predict."
"The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management."
"Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. — comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior."
"Classical organization theory suffers from "ethnocentrism": It ignores the significance of the political, social, and economic milieu in shaping organizations and influencing managerial practice."
"We live today in a world which only faintly resembles that of a half century ago. The standard of living, the level of education, and the political complexion of the United States today profoundly affect both the possibilities and limitations of organizational behavior. In addition, technological changes are bringing about changes in all types of organization. In the military, for example, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage a weapons team in the field as a typical infantry unit was managed a couple of decades ago. Such a team requires a high degree of autonomy. Instead of following explicit orders from superiors, it must be able to adjust its behavior to fit local circumstances within the context of relatively broad objectives. (It is interesting to note the attempts that are made — by "programming" for example — to retain central control over the operations of such units. Established theories of control are not abandoned easily, even in the face of clear evidence of their inappropriateness.) Underlying the principles of classical organization theory are a number of assumptions about human behavior which are at best only partially true."
"Knowledge accumulated during recent decades challenges and contradicts assumptions which are still axiomatic in conventional organizational theory. Unfortunately, those classical principles of organization — derived from inappropriate models, unrelated to the political, social, economic, and technological milieu, and based on erroneous assumptions about behavior — continue to influence our thinking about the management of the human resources of industry. Management's attempts to solve the problems arising from the inadequacy of these assumptions have often involved the search for new formulas, new techniques, new procedures. These generally yield disappointing results because they are adjustments to symptoms rather than causes. The real need is for new theory, changed assumptions, more understanding of the nature of human behavior in organizational settings."
"If there is a single assumption which pervades conventional organizational theory, it is that authority is the central, indispensable means of managerial control."
"The effectiveness of authority as a means of control depends first of all upon the ability to enforce it through the use of punishment. In the two organizations which have been the models for classical organization theory, the situation with respect to enforcement is clear. In the military, authority is enforceable through the court-martial, with the death penalty as the extreme form of punishment. In the Church, excommunication represents the psychological equivalent of the death penalty."
"Behind every managerial decision or action are assumptions about human nature and human behavior."
"The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can."
"The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population."
"It is probable that one day we shall begin to draw organization charts as a series of linked groups rather than as a hierarchical structure of individual "reporting" relationships."
"The essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operations so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives."
"Above all, it is necessary to recognize that knowledge cannot be pumped into human beings the way grease is forced into a machine. The individual may learn; he is not taught."
"Delegation means that he will concern himself with the results of their activities and not with the details of their day-to-day performance. This requires a degree of confidence in them which enables him to accept certain risks. Unless he takes these risks there will be no delegation."
"It is one of the favorite pastimes of headquarters groups to decide from within their professional ivory tower what help the field organization needs and to design and develop programs for meeting these "needs." Then it becomes necessary to get field management to accept the help provided, and a different role is taken by the staff: that of persuading middle and lower management to utilize the programs."
"Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he is committed."
"The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further."
"[Douglas McGregor] coined the two terms and used them to label two sets of beliefs a manager might hold about the origins of human behaviour. He pointed out that the manager's own behaviour would be largely determined by the particular beliefs that he subscribed to....McGregor hoped that his book would lead managers to investigate. "But that isn't what happened. Instead McGregor was interpreted as advocating Theory Y as a new and superior ethic - a set of moral values that ought to replace the values managers usually accept."
"My dissertation for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan was on applications of vectorial methods to metric geometry (in the sense of the Menger school), especially with a view to the merging of metric geometry in that sense with differential geometry. Professor S B Myers at the University of Michigan sponsored my dissertation, but I was particularly close to R L Wilder there."
"For a person who wants to do original, realistic, and critical work in statistics there is no atmosphere anywhere in the world today to compare with this Department."
"[The George E. P. Box paper Fitting empirical data (1960) is] a mature exposition of an important branch of statistics, to which the author has made great contributions. One feature of particular interest is practical discussion of genuinely nonlinear fitting problems and their solution with the help of tact and a special, publicly available, IBM-704 program. Another is insightful comments on the role of prior distributions in statistics."
"[Leonard Jimmie Savage is] one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius."
"R. A. Fisher, J. Neyman, R. von Mises, W. Feller, and L. J. Savage denied vehemently that probability theory is an extension of logic, and accused Laplace and Jeffreys of committing metaphysical nonsense for thinking that it is."
"It was only when L. J. Savage arrived on the scene, and championed the work of Ramsey and de Finetti that the work of these two pioneers in subjective probability first received serious philosophical attention."
"They don't need me to be another Establishment designer. That's not what I'm good at..."
"With the way that the times are, we're all looking for a little fantasy... Fantasy is such an important part of my fashion..."
"I'm always about optimism and exuberance. It's what I feel about fashion."
"We manipulate fabric."
"Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction. That's human nature."
"The sexiest thing about a bikini is that it leaves something to the imagination, which is the best part."
"You have to focus on your dreams, even if they go beyond common sense. How could this young girl from the suburbs of Detroit become a success in New York? It was always that dream."
"Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection."
"To stand out in the crowd I liked the color purple."
"I read about two young ladies that went to Parsons, and when they graduated Elizabeth Taylor opened a store for them in Paris and I thought okay-that's all I have to do!"
"I think a dream can take you farther than anything."
"I think that I appeal to the girliness in all of us."
"The man that owned the company that I worked for called me into the office and said how can you be on our payroll and have your own New York Times ad! This has to stop! And I said but it can't I have orders to ship. And he said well you're fired. And that's how I started my business."
"I'm still dreaming."
"You have to be in the right place at the right time and understand that and know when it is your time and how you react to it and how you respond to it."
"I love research. I love learning..."
"To me, fashion is like a mirror... It's a reflection of the times. And if it doesn't reflect the times, it's not fashion. Because people aren't gonna be wearing it."
"I think whenever people talk about the 'Anna Sui woman,' they're talking about someone that's probably kind of more downtown, and there's always like this ambiguity: Is she a good girl, or a bad girl?"
""It's kind of a dream come true, because to me fashion is not just the clothes, it's all the accoutrements that go with it..."
"I live for fashion."
"I love the whole story of why something happened when it did and that’s what I put into the collections."
"I don’t answer to anyone."
"We do all the first samples here and all the production in the garment center, within these few blocks... I love the process."
"... I am a New York designer and the things are made in New York..."
"I grew up in Middle America and in the suburbs..."
"American television is popular everywhere and its what I grew up on."
"Be true to yourself and figure out what it is that you are good at."
"I was always attracted to the way rock stars dressed and the way their girlfriends dressed."
"When I am designing, I make a selection of music that will be the inspiration behind the whole collection... I will be blasting that music—it becomes a journey I take in my brain to transfer that sound to the clothing."
"I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense."
"I had a really typical, suburban, middle-class upbringing. The only thing out of the ordinary was being one of the few Chinese families in town."
"I am inspired by New York..."
"My main goal when I started my collection – and I didn’t think beyond this actually – was that I wanted to dress rock stars and the people that go to rock concerts."
"We picked up Madonna at The Ritz to go to the Gaultier show together, and she took off her coat. At this point she hadn’t even said a word to me, but she leaned over and said to me, Anna, I have a surprise for you, and she showed me she was wearing my dress."
"I’ve known a lot of talented people but the people that really, really, achieve success – there is ambition, focus and drive behind it."
"I bought a fur coat with my first pay cheque and it lived better than I did for years."
"People create their own obstacles."
"...all the formulas have flown out of the window."
"Sui's gleeful eye sees poetry where fashion conformists see only the absurd."
"The lynchpin of her unique career is encyclopedic curiosity as much as commercial acumen, studied process and a deep respect for the techniques and traditions of her craft."
"Anna Sui is synonymous with black, white and purple..."
"Anna Sui is one of the most important and influential American designers of the past twenty-five years."
"Anna Sui helped define the look of Generation X."
"...a woman who’s been nothing less than American fashion’s best storyteller for nearly three decades."
"When I think of her, I think of Mick Jagger. Jimi Hendrix. Heart. Stevie Nicks."
"Before eclecticism and the magpie mix were fashion world buzzwords, there was Anna Sui."
"She used to be a stylist... and I think that really sharpened her eye, she knows how to tell a story with clothes."
"What stayed true about Anna was this wide eyed wonder, she's always been able to bring such beauty into what she does. I feel like an Anna Sui show is an education."
"It's almost as though she's making one long movie and this movie jumps through times and places but the central character stays the same kind of girl."
"It doesn’t do a critic well to try to neatly connect the dots between Sui’s inspirations and her clothing—the way she mashes up her many references is a singular skill that seems innate and above logical explanation."
"Sui has never failed to stage a fantastical runway show..."
"She’s... been a champion for the Garment District, raised money for the Bowery Mission, and made concerted efforts to help the victims of global tragedies—which is to say that she’s a kind person, who, it was agreed upon in a car after the show with other journalists, happens to also be one of the nicest people in fashion."
"She really is one of our best."
"One of the first things I did when I came on, I said, “I do not want this Kong to be a quadruped. I want him to stand upright, I want a throwback to the 1933 film where he is a biped, because he is a monster. He’s not just a big silverback gorilla, he’s a movie monster.” So I wanted to stand him upright, I wanted to make him tall, and part of that is because I wanted him to feel like this fusion between a god, a man, and a beast. I wanted to make him big enough that, if any of us stood at this table and we looked up at this thing, towered over us, how big does that thing have to be for the first thing that your brain says is, “That’s a god. I’m looking at a god.”"
"Kong, I think represents a classic cinematic case of being misunderstood. And so, tapping into that is a very, very pure way of breaking down his character and then getting into him being this lonely protector, and the sad plight that he has is a totally different thing than we’ve seen before. Was it difficult? Sure, but it was necessary."
"The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China; for Google, it’s Facebook...But here’s the difference: staring down the inevitable, American pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want."
"“You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite—in fact, OK accounts for most things that most people know, and have ever known.”... “So where is it, right? Where’s the OK? Well, it’s in old books, for one thing...—and it’s also in people’s heads, a lot of traditional knowledge, that’s what we call TK. OK and TK.” He’s drawing little overlapping blobs, labeling them with acronyms. “Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again.”"
"He has the strangest expression on his face—the emotive equivalent of 404"
"“We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived...will live again.” A Messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this."
"I feel a little whirl of dislocation—the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected."
"Thank you,Teobaldo You are my greatest friend This has been the key to everything"
"There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care."
"Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in."
"After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time."
"The Internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected."
"Belasco gave me a frank look. “A market in the Bay Area needs, at minimum, three things. It needs fancy coffee, weird honey, and sourdough bread.”"
"And even if I fail—this is always the archivist’s consolation—perhaps I will have laid a foundation for someone wiser."
"I am proud of what I have accomplished, especially while serving as chief justice, at the time I joined the court, it was marked by acrimony. When I became chief justice, we proved that good people who may differ in their opinions can come together and accomplish important things for the people we serve – and we do it amicably."
"I have served on the Court with Bob Young for more than twenty years and there is no Justice who has brought a greater intellect, work ethic, and conscientious commitment to his judicial responsibilities than Bob Young. He has left an extraordinary legacy with regard to the work of the Court and the operation of a fair and responsible justice system in Michigan. In particular, Bob Young’s leadership as Chief Justice of this Court has been of lasting significance in rendering the judiciary of our state leaner, more efficient and accountable, and better focused upon serving "we the people" of Michigan. His impact in furthering the equal rule of law in Michigan will be felt for many years to come."
"My father likes to talk about the stroller accident that resulted in me becoming a Republican."
"You have to feel for the French; they were great once."
"It's a great country."
"All right you fucks, shut up! We got a call to order!"
"I'm too pretty to go to jail."
"[T]here is no campaign trick or spending level or candidate whisperer that can prevent a party from committing political suicide if it wants to."
"I'm a Detroit guy."
"My story is very boring. Mostly about hair loss."
"I'm not an establishmentarian... You think I really want the guys in polyester suits in Springfield, Virginia, running the fucking country? ... I'm an iconoclast, but I am an elitist — with incredibly popular taste."
"If Trump turns out to be the answer, I'm incredibly proud that Jeb Bush did not want to be any part of the vile question."
"If Trump kept up Jeb's schedule for one day, he'd be in the hospital... He doesn't open a rally with "I want everybody to write down the name of any Mexican they know and put it in a bin because they are going to pay." It was all a code word for "civilized". Jeb was the anti-Trump in a Trump year. But being the anti-Trump is a huge badge of fucking honor. I think you get that tattooed on your forehead: "I'm the anti-Trump." People will be congratulating him on that the rest of his life."
"I'd rather cut my arm off than vote for that jerk."
"Loyalty is not a small thing. I'm an old Irish pol. No loyalty is owed, if no loyalty was given."
"It's a choice between Trump, who is terrible for the country, and Cruz, who is terrible for the party. He's too smart for his act ... and he's probably pissed that a bigger con man showed up."
"The pain is legit. But Trump is a stupid vote. Because Trump won't solve any of those things, he'll make them all worse. You're voting against your pain. You're voting to create more. You're going for a kind of witch doctor of politics who is promising things based on magic."
"[H]aving problems is not a license to vote stupid. People need the tractor to plow the damn field, now."
"We like to say law, order, freedom — pick one, amigo."
"[I]f your banker comes in one day wearing a diaper, speaking gibberish, you're going to pull your money out of that checking account."
"You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He'll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China."
"I don't mind technique... I can be shameless. I have a long career at this. But when everything is a short con, then there's never another short con. Because you need trust, and you've destroyed it."
"I don't mind a good fight on an issue. I like that stuff. I don't mind negative ads. But when the fighting is over meaningless stuff, like "you're-low-energy-because-you-use-big-words-and-don't-hate-anybody-and-I-wear-a-red-hat-that-says-Make-America-Great-Again-because-I-played-a-business-guy-on-TV"? We cheapen the category to the point where we're getting an outcome that is actually a bit dangerous."
"My revenge is living well... I want to go get on a freighter and go through the Panama Canal. All I've ever wanted in my life is freedom and access. I like being backstage and watching the weird, human drama of all of these strange personalities that politics attracts."
"[O]ld lady sends her $25 to defeat Nancy Pelosi, and $22 of it goes to "fundraising costs"."
"[Y]ou can't have grievance politics without endless whining. I think if you got the Founding Fathers or the first hundred guys killed at Anzio Beach, brought them back to life, and said, "What do you think of all this?" "What a bunch of whiners. Have you ever had 400 Germans coming at ya? Put on a red hat and say Make America Great Again? What have you done, pal?""
"If we have real, creative destruction here with Trump, and we have Armageddon or worse, out of the ruins will come new successes. New movements. And eventually, new rackets. And I'll be in on them. I admit it, I'm a racketeer."
"Trump has gotten six or seven stories in his presidency so far, that if they happened in 1981, there would have been serious talk about the president needing to resign. And that's gone now, that ray gun of, "We don't do this. You can’t get away with that" is pretty much gone."
"Everything is a racial stereotype with him half the time; we've got to admit that about Trump."
"[T]here was something about Obama that brought out the real alt-right crap. And because it was like one of these things where, "Hey, there are a bunch of cannibals that have joined our army, and they’re doing pretty well on the left flank." "Good, give them guns." You know? That kind of mentality. And so now, half the party is eaten by cannibals. And guess what? They’re eating us next."
"Any good demagogue is very courageously telling people exactly what they want to hear."
"People get what they vote for."
"A Moscow loving grifter is on the loose in the White House. Shame on the Vichy Republicans who constantly enable him."
"[T]he larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party... Trump's shtick is that he's the grievance candidate... He's focused on the economically squeezed Caucasian voter... He is speaking to that rage. Mexican rapists, clever Chinese traders, African American people as dogs. That's Trump's DNA."
"Whatever interesting things America have happened, they've happened first in California."
"[W]e've got to break this equation of "I'm right, you're evil. So everything you do is suspect, everything you say is a lie, your facts are fake news." Because that is an acid on politics. We've got to get rid of that."
"You want to win in politics? Stop wasting time being dragged screaming out of hearings and learn to f'ing organize. Signed, Reality."
"GOP last tracks have been lurching in wrong direction. Big thanks to ol’ POTUS who is working so hard to make the midterms all about him and his epic racist madness."
"Well, you know, the future is always unmade, and my crystal ball is badly cracked because I’m one of the geniuses that said that "Trump is going to lose by a couple of million votes; he can't win." Well, he lost by a couple of million popular votes, but in the Electoral College, very narrowly, he was able to win."
"If Napoleon had nuclear subs, we’d all be speaking French. So, the history thing can be oversold."
"[H]ow popular is the president? Normally, they lose seats when they are kind of average popular. If they are unpopular, it tends to have a magnifying effect. And we do know, from averaging all the polls together, that Donald Trump is the most unpopular first-year president in the history of polling, easily. There’s nobody – he is first, second, and third place. So that is a bad thing... You know, there could be a foreign intervening event. Martians land with the same hair and say, you know, "Only he understands us, and we are going to save the planet." But, assuming normalcy, the forces are pretty bad."
"[T]he more he governs, often the more trouble he gets into. He does not improve; he gets more unpopular, at least with the two-thirds of the country that is very suspicious of him."
"Trump is going to go under an electron microscope. And everything I know about Donald Trump, and I know a fair bit about him going back to my Jersey days when he was operating in Atlantic City – that’s where I first kind of encountered him – he is one of the least likely people to survive an electron microscope into his life, I believe, and his business life of anybody. So, my instincts are strongly that they are going to find some stuff."
"[T]he disease of the Republican Party is we treat base voters like swing voters, when, in fact, is you want to put the base under some pain to attract other people to get to a majority number."
"[T]he only mark-to-market thing in politics is Election Day; everything else is hot air."
"I've said the Romney scenario just because: Right about Putin, right about Obama, right about Trump. And he’s no drama; a nice boring presidency of competence."
"In the end, they killed Rasputin."
"Now, there is of course one great rescue device for the Republican Party that we have thankfully relied on time and time again and that of course is the Democrats."
"Mike is the most entertaining, most knowledgeable, and most insightful guy I have ever dealt with. I am constantly entertained by him."
"I like Murphy. He's very mischievous. Very funny. He has no problem puncturing the conventional wisdom. He has that Irish twinkle in his eye."
"I noticed an immediate difference and so did my friends and teammates. My body composition changed — my body fat went down, my lean muscle went up, and I got stronger. I could also run faster and my recovery time improved."
"I felt so much lighter. My joints felt smoother, everything felt better. I could run and breathe easier. … I’ve always been a guy who has done everything I can to help myself. Any little advantage I can find, I’m going to do it. I felt like this really gave me an edge. … It’s not too tough now. I would say the first six months, maybe a year, is pretty tough because you’re totally reprogramming what you look for to fill your plate up."
"Nowhere in the Quran does it say punish homosexuals. And historians have also never found any case of the Prophet Muhammad dealing with homosexuality."
"When I graduated from high school, I hoped that one day gay Americans would be able to get married. And now here I am 45 years later officiating same-sex marriages—how can I not be optimistic that the future is bright?"
"The younger they are, the more tolerant and accepting they are of LGBT Muslims, there are even older Muslims who are now supportive, including a grandmother here and there."
"Some don’t believe that homosexuals can be pious. But we can be just as good at our faith as anyone else. We are simply different from other folks, not less committed to our faith."
"Some people are uncomfortable with gays, but your discomfort with my sexuality should not translate into me having less rights as an American."
"I believe every person, no matter if I disagree with you or not, you have the right as a Muslim to have the proper spiritual [rites] and rituals provided for you. And whoever judges you that will be Allah’s decision, not me."
"I was pretty much raised in an entirely vegetarian household. I wasn't aware that there was a whole community of vegetarians out there. There was a point where I said, "I want to understand the other side of this situation," and I ate meat for maybe three years. Then right around the time that I phased meat out and became vegetarian, I recognized that I was lactose intolerant. So again, I was completely naïve to the fact that there was a thing called veganism. After a few years, I started going to a lot of hardcore shows where everybody was and vegan. That was when I found out that there were other people that were like-minded."
"I'm not a man-hater. (I am) so used to being treated like dirt that I guess it's become a way of life. I'm a decent person."
"With Tyria I was going to begin. But she always spent my bread that I’d make. and I never had a chance to. So the next day I’d go out and make more. It was so easy to. And big bucks. All the bars, fancy night clubs, and restaurants we’d hit. As well as her buying clothes for herself. I had one beat up bra, a few pair of underwear—recked tennis shoes. 3 pairs of pants and 5 T-shirts to my name. She had gobs of clothes. I couldn't help it. I was insanely in love with her. And just wanted her to have it all. I was her puppet."
"Let me tell you what can happen in a rape. Your hair gets pulled out, he shoves his penis fully erected down your throat and bruises your esophagus, as well as the roof and sides of the (inside cheeks) of your mouth... Also telling you, if you scratch my cock with your teeth, your dead. Then he pulls your pussy hairs out, for additional pain, grabs your ass real hard like (kneading dough) as he’s cramming his cock in you, same thing in anal screwing. Bites nipples, to also, nearly cutting em off as he’s screwing you viciously, pounding as fast and as hard as he can... And also while all this is going on, threats are being made, and dirty talk at the most provocativeness profanity you could imagine. So rape is not just get on and get off.! Stupid fuckers. Society apparently doesn't understand this, nor cares to, especially if you’re a hooker. There allowed to treat you like this, and also kill you..."
"I still love her. Can’t let her go! She could shoot me, and if I survived it. I woulda had open arms, still, with lots of love to give. That’s Just the way I am. I Love to give Love. I know I’ve hurt, myself over being this away. But the pain, doesn’t feel, so bad, when you know your struggling to give love, for a cause that really pays off. I know for a fact. Ty and I would've stayed together for life. If this Shit hadda never of happened. She told me on the phone, in one of the recorded phone calls at VCBJ. Lord did I cry on that phone. Cut me up like a machete attack to the heart. Arlene, wants to keep her away from my funeral. I want Tyria at my funeral more then Anything."
"As children relating to others, we learned a great deal about creating peace and prosperity. Most of us can remember Mom or Dad prying us apart from a playmate after we came to blows. ‘Who started it?’ often determined who received the most severe punishment. Even at a tender, we could see that if no one hit first, no fight was possible."
"Bureaucrats have little incentive for efficiency when consumers must pay for the service, whether they use it or not. The proof of this inefficiency is the enormous savings enjoyed when public services are contracted out to private firms instead of being performed by government employees. California cities save between 37% and 96% by contracting out their street cleaning, janitorial services, trash collection, traffic signal repairs, grass cutting, and street maintenance/overlay construction"
"Today, of course, aggression once again keeps the disadvantaged from creating wealth for themselves and their loved ones. Minimum wage laws exclude unskilled workers from the Job market, while increasing the prices they must pay for goods and services. Licensing laws squeeze small companies out of business. Sixty percent of all new Jobs in the United States."
"Many individuals are capable of creating wealth but are excluded from the job market by minimum wage and licensing laws. Much poverty can be alleviated by allowing people to create wealth at whatever level they can and ‘work their way up.’"
"The housing problem that generates homelessness has been linked to the aggression of rent control, zoning restrictions, building codes, and construction moratoriums, all of which limit the availability of inexpensive housing. When construction is limited and landlords can charge only a minimal rent, they naturally rent to only the most affluent ten-ants. rather than the poor who might be late in their payments. Once again, aggression hurts those it is supposed to protect."
"As long as we employ the guns of government to force our neighbors to our will, aggression will be the instrument by which we enslave ourselves. This is as true of global government as it is of our local and national ones."
"We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. In failing to honor our neighbor's choice, we create a world of poverty and strife."
"Because selfish owners want to profit as much as possible from their land, they have incentive to treat their property in a way that increases its value to others. The price that owners can get for the land depends on how other members of society value the care given to it"
"Children who willingly participate in sexual acts have the right to make that decision as well, even if it's distasteful to us personally. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess. When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will."
"We defer to authority figures because they are supposed to know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it's easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure we defer to. Choosing to defer to one who urges aggression against others still puts the responsibility on us.”"
"Through taxation, pacifists are forced at gunpoint to pay for killing machines; vegetarians are forced at gunpoint to subsidize grazing land for cattle; nonsmokers are forced at gunpoint to support both the production of tobacco and the research to counter its impact on health. These minorities are the victims, not the initiators of aggression. Their only crime is not agreeing with the priorities of the majority. Taxation appears to be more than theft; it is intolerance for the preferences and even the moral viewpoints of our neighbors. Through taxation we forcibly impose our will on others in an attempt to control their choices.”"
"Indeed, taxation and other forms of aggression-through-government are so taken for granted in our culture that one of our most popular sayings is that ‘nothing is certain except death and taxes.’ Yet slavery was once as universal. Taxation is thought to be indispensable to civilization today, just as slavery once was. Advocates of taxation claim that since most people pay assigned taxes before the guns show up, they have implicitly agreed to it as the price of living in ‘society.’ Most slaves obeyed their master before he got out the whip, yet we would hardly argue that this constituted agreement to their servitude. Today, we have an enlightened perspective on slavery, just as one day we will have an enlightened perspective on taxes and other forms of aggression we now think of as ‘the only way.’"
"Aggression hides in our culture under many names. Taxation is only an example, but one of the most widespread and uneconomical. If this concept seems incredible to you, consider the shift in awareness that it implies. Are we like children, accepting five pennies for our dime?"
"The marketplace has many similarities to nature's rainforest and oceanic ecosystems. Left to their own devices, the marketplace and the earth's ecosystems are self-regulating. Neither requires our forceful intervention to establish a holistic balance in which a diversity of complimentary niches can evolve. Aggression in the marketplace or destruction in a natural ecosystem upsets this balance. Some of the niches are destroyed along with their occupants. Diversity is lost."
"Wealth is created when we use existing resources in new ways. Since such creativity is virtually limitless, wealth is too."
"When we consider that resources will one day be mined from planets other than the earth, that matter and energy are totally interchangeable, and that basic chemical elements can be transmuted, we realize that resource seeds are so abundant that they do not impose practical limitations on the creation of wealth at all."
"In the marketplace ecosystem, interference usually means aggression-through-government. When we don’t like the outcomes that we get in the marketplace, we sometimes try to correct its ‘imperfections’ with laws that force our neighbors—at gunpoint, if necessary—to do things differently… Imperfections of the marketplace ecosystem are dwarfed by the havoc created by our well-meaning aggression."
"[M]ost poverty in the world today is caused by aggression, not ignorance. The illusion that aggression-through-government benefits the poor at the expensive of the rich is just that, an illusion."
"Many subsidized exclusive monopolies are public services. On average, we pay twice as much through our taxes for these services as we would if they were provided by the private sector."
"By making our police force an exclusive, subsidized government monopoly, we increase the cost and decrease the quality of protection, especially for the poor. By banning handguns, we disarm the disadvantage."
"Those too poor to own their own home pay no property taxes, but their rent reflects the taxes that the landlord must pay. The poor pay higher rents to subsidize inefficiency and waste."
"In the late 1980s, Soviets were allowed to keep the wealth they created by raising vegetables on their garden plots. Although these plots composed only about 2% of the agricultural lands in the Soviet Union, they produced 25% of the food! When Soviets kept the wealth they created, they produced almost 16 times more than when it was taken from them at gunpoint, if necessary!"
"In spite of the additional financial burden, struggling immigrants made great sacrifices to educate their children as they saw fit rather than send them to inexpensive or even free public schools. Catholics saw the public schools as vehicles for Protestant propaganda and established parochial schools. German immigrants sent their children to private institutions when the public ones refused to teach them in German as well as in English. Immigrants who wanted their children to learn their native tongue and their Old World history opted for private or parochial schools that catered to their preferences."
"Can you imagine a school system funded by taxation hiring a teacher who equated taxation with theft? Hardly! Consequently, our children are instructed by teachers who believe that first-strike force, fraud, or theft is acceptable as long as it’s for a good cause."
"The Swiss people are the best practitioners of the ideals of non-aggression. The Swiss national government posts are parttime positions. Most decisions are made at the canton (state) level. Swiss per capita income is the highest in the world, showing that non-aggression pays. How did the Swiss come to adopt a relatively non-aggressive constitution in an aggressive world? In the mid-1800s, they imitated our constitution and stuck with it!"
"The basic premise of libertarianism is that each individual should be free to do as he or she pleases so long as he or she does not harm others."
"Throughout the world, law enforcement has many characteristics of fourth-layer aggression. Police, courts, and prosecutors are often part of tax-subsidized government monopolies that we are forced to use. As with all such aggression, we end up with high-cost, low-quality service and little innovation. We pay too much for too little."
"We are more likely to protect the environment when we own a piece of it and profit by nurturing it. *Whenever people do not pay the full cost of something they use, they have less incentive to conserve. For example, when people pay the same amount of taxes for solid waste disposal whether they recycle or not, fewer people are inclined to recycle. As a consequence, we have more waste and disposal problems."
"Actually, libertarianism assumes people will look after their own selfish interests. Because interaction is voluntary in a libertarian society, people can only cater to their own selfish interests by paying attention to what others want."
"As for charitable giving, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the high level of generosity he observed during his travels in the early days of the United States. People who are free and prosperous are more likely to share with those who have less."
"Libertarians are the ultimate decentralists: libertarians want to take government from the nation, state, and community down to the level of the individual. The closer to this ideal that we come, the more libertarian our society should be."
"Libertarians don’t tell starving people to ‘eat cake;’ they prevent starvation by creating an abundance of ‘cake.’ Virtually all poverty in the world today is a result of governments aggressing against their people. Free countries, on the other hand, end poverty by removing the laws that foster it. They create an abundance of wealth because the poor aren’t legally ostracized from supporting themselves."
"Libertarians don’t want to do away with force, just ‘first-strike’ force. If neither of us strike first, no fight is possible. If you are behaving peacefully, and I assault, defraud, or steal from you, then defensive force is permissible in a libertarian society."
"Government is, in essence, the privileged class dominating the disadvantage. The Big Lie is that government is the friend of the poor and the foe of the well-to-do."
"Simply, libertarians do not advocate the initiation of force, fraud, or theft to achieve social or political goals. If you refused to contribute to my favorite charity, and I took your money at gunpoint anyway, I’d be stealing from you. Similarly, if I vote for taxes to force you to contribute to that charity, I’m asking the government to take your money—at gunpoint, if necessary… Wrong doesn’t turn into right, just because the majority agrees to it. Minorities have no protection if they have to depend upon the majority for it."
"In a libertarian society, aggressors would be required to compensate their victims and pay for costs of their trial and apprehension. Studies show that such restitution is one of the most effective deterrents known."
"A person who harms another owes the victim compensation. If the victim has been killed, the claim to that compensation usually passes to the victim’s heirs. Without apparent heirs, it’s possible that a libertarian jury would direct the compensation towards a charity or group that the victim favored. Although compensation is primarily awarded to restore the victim, studies show that restitution serves to rehabilitate the criminal as well."
"A free-market is the only way to control corporations! As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government!"
"Our greatest polluter is the government (i.e., U.S. military), not corporate America. Putting government in charge of protecting the environment is like asking the fox to guard the hen house."
"When courts found the military liable for illness and death after careless nuclear testing in Utah, the government claimed sovereign immunity and refused to pay damages. In a libertarian society, no one would be immune from the consequences of their actions, especially not a government charged with protecting us."
"The best way to empower the poor is to allow them to become rich—rich enough to buy land. This is easier than it seems, since most poverty today, even in the Third World, is a direct result of aggression-through-government. Minimum wage and licensing laws put the disadvantage out of work, creating poverty by destroying jobs. When government aggression lessens, poverty decreases too."
"Most non-Western governments make it difficult to get clear land titles. Approximately 60-80% of such property is ‘extralegal,’ making it difficult to borrow against or transfer. As a result, while the poor in these countries ‘hold’ a great deal of land, they cannot easily use its full potential."
"Of course, in a libertarian society, laws discriminating against gay people would not exist. For instance, same-sex couples find themselves facing the same laws against intermarriage as blacks and whites once did. In a libertarian society, marriage would be a private contract between two willing individuals who could set the terms to suit themselves."
"Most economists believe that the Great Depression was primarily a result of the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the national currency. Had the government not interfered with the banking industry by giving the Fed a monopoly on money, the Depression might have never occurred. Too much government, not too little, was the culprit."
"When you subsidize anything, you get more of it. Paying teens even a pittance to have more children encourages them to do so. By the time they are old enough to vote, they finally realize that they will always be poor unless they can get into the work force. By then, however, it is almost too late. Unless a relative helps out, child care costs are prohibitive for someone starting in an entry level job. They find themselves forever stuck in the ‘Poverty Trap.’"
"When the Statue of Liberty was erected, government was the acknowledged enemy of the poor. Lady Liberty asked for the poor, the wretched refuse, the masses, not the wealthy or skilled. Why? Because everyone understood that the poor prospered best when government didn’t put them out of their jobs with excessive regulations. In the 1880s, for example, guild membership was required in Europe to work in certain occupations and the poor had a difficult time qualifying."
"Libertarian societies also create immense wealth primarily because the poor are not excluded from the labor market. Studies show that the closer a country is to the libertarian ideal, the more even is its distribution of wealth."
"Libertarians believe that no one should be forced to support another. If a woman has chosen to gift a fetus with life, it does not necessarily follow that she is obligated to continue to support it with her body, especially if that support threatens the woman’s life. A woman’s body is her property, to do with as she wishes."
"Libertarians support free trade, but it doesn’t take the five hundred plus pages of the NAFTA agreement to say ‘no more restrictions between us.’"
"When tariffs are eliminated, consumers pay less for foreign goods. They therefore have more money to spend on other things. Their spending creates more new jobs than those that are lost."
"By the late 1970s, armed citizens were killing more criminals in self-defense than the police. Many more would-be attackers and robbers are deterred from their crime when their intended victim simply brandishes a firearm."
"An armed society is a polite society, and the not-so-wild West was rather peaceful, in spite of Hollywood’s violent portrayal. As a legacy, in the rural West where every household still has firearms, crime is less than in eastern cities."
"‘Mandatory’ means forced—at gunpoint, if necessary. When we force people to do things, for their own good or the good of others, we violate their right of self-determination. Libertarians respect the rights of others to choose their own path—that’s what liberty is all about. If community service is such a good deal, we should have no trouble persuading people to do it voluntarily. If we can’t convince others that our way is best, maybe we should humbly consider the possibility that it isn’t."
"In a libertarian society, big business wouldn’t be so big, since they couldn’t destroy their competition through government regulation. Without government control of the airways, more radio and television stations would be available and could not be shut down on political whim."
"One way to eliminate the Federal Communications Commission would be to auction off all of the frequencies and allow them to be bought and sold like other property. Trespass by other stations would be handled just like trespass on land. Bandwidths useful for new applications could be ‘homesteaded’ just as land once was."
"When we, as individuals, take from our neighbors what they won’t voluntarily give—at gunpoint, if necessary—we call it theft. When majorities take from minorities what they won’t voluntarily give—at gunpoint, if necessary—we call it taxation."
"As children, we learned that if no one hits first, no fight is possible. Therefore, refraining from ‘first-strike’ force, theft, or fraud, is the first step in creating peace."
"Congress enacted the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the 1938 Food and Drug Act… What the Amendments actually did was increase the time it takes for a new drug to move from the lab bench to the marketplace: a change from 4 years to 14 years over the next few decades. Terminally ill patients who couldn’t live with the delay turned to the black market to get access to potential cures. Every year, the cost of satisfying the FDA have soared, resulting to ever-increasing prices at the pharmacy. More than half of our potential innovations have never made it to patients because companies realized they couldn’t recoup their investments under the new regulations."
"Even when the FDA agrees to expanded access, pharmaceutical companies are often reluctant to give terminal patients a drug that is still in development. If patients die from organ failure related to their disease, the FDA may require additional studies from the manufacturer to make sure that the death was not hurried along by the drug. Naturally, the extra studies increase the development timeline and overall cost."
"When the AIDS epidemic began, the US pharmacist had little to offer its unfortunate victims. Consequently, AIDS patients began bringing in antiviral drugs or immune stimulants that were approved in other nations, such as ribavirin and Isoprinosine. It might have made sense to approve those drugs on the basis of data from other countries, but back then the FDA insisted on considering only studies done in the United States."
"How many innovative, potentially lifesaving drugs never make it to the marketplace because of the added costs in time and money imposed by the [Kefauver-Harris] Amendments? No one knows for sure, but the studies that have been done imply that we’ve lost about 80% of the innovations that we would have had in the absence of he Amendments."
"A lot of times, as I like to say, I was the only chip in the cookie…I chose to embrace who I am and what I do, and keep my head down and keep writing, and hoped that things would change. But it was lonely in the sense that I was the only."
"I’m still learning, I’m still finding stuff that fascinates me. I’m still putting people out front who I call the “unsung” — those who once had places in history and made a difference, but who have now been forgotten. Because, you know, you bring them back to life [when you write about them], and they live again."
"I enjoy all the different levels of engagement. Whether it’s going to be a slow burn or an instant, raging forest fire depends on the story…"
"There were never any characters that looked like me or my sisters or my girlfriends…Our stories needed to be told."
"So much depends upon a priest’s personality. All you have are priests who have been validly ordained who are doing the best they can to sustain the Church and to save souls. People get upset when they hear about priests fighting and they are really consoled when they see other priests coming for a visit. They yearn to be part of something bigger. That’s the attraction of the SSPX — a parallel church."
"We are surrounded by darkness and are afraid to venture out. Unless we do, however, we will not find God, because it is only by leaving what is safe and comfortable to pierce the darkness that we will find the light of God. This is a fitting metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage that all of us have to make out of our self-contained comfort zone into the wide world of God and God’s people in the Catholic Church."
"Our purpose in the Church is to share the light of Christ. We cannot allow scandals to impede our sharing of the Good News."
"What in our lives could be more important than receiving the Body and Blood of Christ each week? Recall how, for many of us who participated in team sports or band, we had to practice before the next game or concert. Well, by going to Mass every week, we become better Christians and most certainly have a better understanding of Jesus’ “game plan” for each and every one of us, as well as for the human family. As in sports, if you continue to miss practice, you become less and less an effective member of the team. While Mass is much more than practice, I hope you get the point."
"Unleash The Gospel is not a numbers game. It's about falling in love with the one who loves us, and that's a person-by-person change."
"I cannot come in with preconceptions of any issue. I need to listen what we can do to resolve and heal the wounds left in the community."
"We're still a mission diocese and we have missionary needs."
"I was a priest to the Catholics and a chaplain to all."
"I think it's more important to be out. They need to know who I am and see me to talk to me, and if they have a problem, they can confront me. If I'm not there, I'm just kind of a figurehead in Seattle."
"Visit the past, but don't stay there."
"Critical thinking is a threat to unhealthy systems, and questions make people think."
"Honesty isn’t betrayal; it’s courage. Stop sugarcoating your experiences and allow the truth to free you. People often misrepresent their relationships and experiences because they’re too afraid to admit what’s true. But denial will keep you from breaking free from your past."
"What you're searching for in others lies within you."
"Be the person you would have looked up to in childhood."
"You aren't what happened to you."
"understanding breeds grace."
"The most important question you need to answer is What do you want for your life? Bear in mind that what you want might not currently exist in your family."
"We can't stop others from neglecting us, but we can stop ignoring ourselves."
"Resilience is the ability to embrace what happened."
"Boundaries will set you free. (Introduction)"
"The ability to say no to yourself is a gift. If you can resist your urges, change your habits, and say yes to only what you deem truly meaningful, you’ll be practicing healthy self-boundaries. It’s your responsibility to care for yourself without excuses."
"Tell people what you need."
"We don't naturally fall into perfect relationship; we create them"
"How they treat you is about who they are, not who you are."
"The hardest thing about implementing boundaries is accepting that some people won’t like, understand, or agree with yours. Once you grow beyond pleasing others, setting your standards becomes easier. Not being liked by everyone is a small consequence when you consider the overall reward of healthier relationships."
"People don’t know what you want. It’s your job to make it clear. Clarity saves relationships."
"healthy people appreciate honesty and don’t abandon us if we say no."
"Discomfort is a part of the process."
"It’s true that setting boundaries isn’t easy. Paralyzing fear about how someone might respond can easily hold us back. You might play out awkward interactions in your mind and prepare yourself for the worst possible outcome. But trust me: short-term discomfort for a long-term healthy relationship is worth it every time!"
"we victimize ourselves further when we let our fear prevent us from doing what we need to do."
"It may be hard to just listen without offering advice as people share their problems, but this is often the best support we can give."
"We simply can’t have a healthy relationship with another person without communicating what’s acceptable and unacceptable to us."
"Fear is not rooted in fact. Fear is rooted in negative thoughts and the story lines in our heads."
"Avoidance is a passive-aggressive way of expressing that you are tired of showing up. Hoping the problem will go away feels like the safest option, but avoidance is a fear-based response. Avoiding a discussion of our expectations doesn’t prevent conflict. It prolongs the inevitable task of setting boundaries."
"Remember: there is no such thing as guilt-free boundary setting. If you want to minimize (not eliminate) guilt, change the way you think about the process. Stop thinking about boundaries as mean or wrong; start to believe that they’re a nonnegotiable part of healthy relationships, as well as a self-care and wellness practice."
"It’s okay for a small child to set limits like not eating meat or feeling uncomfortable around certain people. Parents who respect those boundaries make space for their children to feel safe and loved, and they reinforce the positive habit of articulating needs. When parents ignore these preferences, children feel lonely, neglected, and like their needs don’t matter—and they will likely struggle with boundaries as adults."
"Burnout is a response to unhealthy boundaries."
"I don’t think there’s any skill more critical for success than resilience...I think about resilience as the speed and strength of your response to adversity."
"Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. You reciprocate a favor by paying it back. You honor an act of kindness by paying it forward."
"If you've ever had a boss who one day had your back and then the next day stabbed you in the back, or vice versa, that's a lot more stressful if we look at the research, than just having the boss who you knew was gonna stab you in the back."
"Young kids have wider circles of concern than adults. Adults expect people to enjoy the misfortune of groups they dislike. But 3-5-year-olds expect people to care about everyone's suffering. Compassion is an instinct—we don't have to learn it. We need to stop unlearning it."
"Authenticity without boundaries is careless. Authenticity without empathy is selfish."
"Think like a scientist: treat your opinions as hypotheses and decisions as experiments."
"Embrace confident humility: argue like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong."
"Time doesn't heal psychological wounds. Perspective does...Time creates distance. Reflection offers wisdom."
"Many people, I think, on our planet right now despair, and they think we've reached a point where we've discovered most of the things. I'm going tell you right now: please don't despair."
"It is time that we recognize that morality and ethics determines what we believe and not our political party. Are we Catholic first or are we adherents to a political party and then Catholic?"
"I saw the world change in the almost fifty years I've been a priest and the twelve years I've been a bishop, we never know what the future is going to hold. If we can make that act of faith that Jesus will never leave us, that he will be with us until the end of time, we can move forward with confidence."
"It's politically correct only to speak of those things that are subjective, only to speak of those things that you determine "work for you," they may not "work for me." We're in a prison with that. They want to break out of that prison that holds them bound. Once they know the truth – and the truth is Christ – that sets them free. And then their acts of freedom are rooted in Christ."
"I don't know how many I killed. I wasn't thinking. I wasn't counting. I was just shooting."
"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Sp5c. Johnson, a tank driver with Company B, was a member of a reaction force moving to aid other elements of his platoon, which was in heavy contact with a battalion-size North Vietnamese force. Sp5c. Johnson's tank, upon reaching the point of contact, threw a track and became immobilized. Realizing that he could do no more as a driver, he climbed out of the vehicle, armed only with a .45 caliber pistol. Despite intense hostile fire, Sp5c. Johnson killed several enemy soldiers before he had expended his ammunition. Returning to his tank through a heavy volume of antitank-rocket, small-arms and automatic weapon fire, he obtained a submachine gun with which to continue his fight against the advancing enemy. Armed with this weapon, Sp5c. Johnson again braved deadly enemy fire to return to the center of the ambush site where he courageously eliminated more of the determined foe. Engaged in extremely close combat when the last of his ammunition was expended, he killed an enemy soldier with the stock end of his submachine gun. Now weaponless, Sp5c. Johnson ignored the enemy fire around him, climbed into his platoon sergeant's tank, extricated a wounded crewmember and carried him to an armored personnel carrier. He then returned to the same tank and assisted in firing the main gun until it jammed. In a magnificent display of courage, Sp5c. Johnson exited the tank and again armed only with a .45 caliber pistol, engaged several North Vietnamese troops in close proximity to the vehicle. Fighting his way through devastating fire and remounting his own immobilized tank, he remained fully exposed to the enemy as he bravely and skillfully engaged them with the tank's externally mounted .50 caliber machine gun, where he remained until the situation was brought under control. Sp5c. Johnson's profound concern for his fellow soldiers, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Army."
"Six days after his first and last battle in Vietnam, he was back at his mother's home, in the last week of January 1968. He'd missed the Tet Offensive, the January 30 across-the-board attack on American installations, by a hair's breadth, and his buddies back in Detroit thought it was good sport to tease him about how he'd gotten off easy. He never contradicted them. In fact, he agreed with them, insisting that nothing had happened during the war. He tried to appear unaffected and sociable. Those who didn't know him well couldn't tell that anything was wrong. He seemed to be filling up his days with as much activity as possible. No one knew he was having nightmares. One friend said, however, that he had color slides of dead Vietcong in his room. In the fall, Johnson started trying to get a job, and his cousin Thomas Tillman got to see a side of him he didn't know existed. Johnson was a friendly, gregarious, outgoing guy, a practical joker. But when he tried for a job, Tillman said, "He'd just sit and mumble a few words when they'd ask him questions. It was like he felt inferior." He only tried for the jobs that had minimal qualifications, even though he'd qualified as a tank driver in the Army. And even then, he got nowhere. "For two months we went around to place after place and got doors slammed in our face... People gave him a lousy break. Nothing happened decent to him.""
"President Johnson had used previous Medal of Honor ceremonies to vilify the war protestors. This time, however, with the peace talks in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam moving forward, and Johnson's administration about to leave the White House, he chose to focus on the distant possibilities of peace and national unity as he presented five medals to five Vietnam veterans. "In this company we hear again, in our minds, the sound of distant battles. This room echoes once more to those words that describe the heights of bravery in war- above and beyond the call of duty... These five soldiers, in their separate moments of supreme testing, summoned a degree of courage that stirs wonder and respect and an overwhelming pride in all of us.""
"William Charette and countless others have spoken about survivor guilt. Johnson had the guilt of surviving coupled with the knowledge that he would have died along with his friends in his original tank, but for the Army's reassignment. He also had the experience of what officials in Vietnam called a "personal kill." Hardly any soldier, no matter how hardened, can walk away from a face-to-face killing like this without being affected. On top of that, he had the memory of the enemy's rifle pointed at his chest and the sound of the click. Everyone at the scene of the battle could see he was highly disturbed by what he'd just experienced. At home, however, no one knew what he'd just been through and no one could even approach understanding what happened to him. According to Dwight Johnson's father-in-law, "He always said he should have died over there. He said he couldn't understand why he didn't.""
"Johnson walked down the block to the Sip 'n' Chat bar and sat down. He ordered a shot of Johnnie Waler and a Pabst. He drank slowly, paid, and left. Johnson then walked across the street to the Open Pantry Market, what they call a "party store" in Detroit. He asked for a pack of cigarettes. He offered a bill to pay. When the storeowner opened the register, Johnson pulled a .22 caliber pistol and told him to step aside. The owner lunged for the gun when Johnson reached for the money. The pistol went off, twice. One bullet grazed the owner; the other entered his left arm. The owner reached under the counter and produced his own gun. He started firing. "I hit him with two bullets, but he just stood there, with the gun in his hand, and said, 'I'm going to kill you.' I kept pulling the trigger until my gun was empty," the storeowner told police. Dwight Johnson was taken to the hospital with three bullet wounds in his chest and one to his face. He died on an operating table at 4:00 A.M. The police who went throigh his wallet for ID found a card that read "Congressional Medal of Honor Society, United States of America" and "This certifies that Dwight H. Johnson is a member of this society.""
"Years later, the Veterans Administration ruled that Johnson was not able to "make a rational decision," opening the way for an increased pension for his wife. They'd heard testimony from a representative of the Detroit Disabled American Veterans, who'd been fighting Katrina for two and a half years. He said Johnson had been used "to motivate other blacks, not honoring [him] for what he did, saving lives by killing the enemy, but using him." Other testimony, from a Detroit psychiatrist, claimed that "Johnson's criminal behavior was an effort to get himself killed." That's what Johnson's mother thought, and it was with a quote from her that Nordheimer chose to end his article. "Sometimes I wonder," she said, "if Skip tired of this life and needed someone else to pull the trigger.""
"There does exist a distinctly American way of life which properly ought to be preserved. But it is not defined by race. The American way of life is defined by philosophy. ... The American nation emerged unique, defined not by its shared ethnic or racial or religious identity, but by its shared allegiance to liberty."
"[R]acism should be opposed, not because it offends, but because it denies the nature of human beings as individuals and places a group above them. Collectivism comes in many forms, with beneficiaries defined on different terms. But whether it's the nation, the race, the faith, the tribe, or any other overriding entity, no group has the right to subordinate individuals, ever, under any circumstances. That is the American way of life."