People From California

"My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community."

"Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal."

"The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact."

"I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism."

"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life."

"Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death."

"I do not think life will change for the better without an assault on the establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions."

"To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner."

"You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!"

"When you deal with a man, deal with his most valuable possession, his life. There's play and there's the deep flow. I like to take things to the deep flow of play, because everything is a game, serious and nonserious at the same time. So play life like it's a game."

"My foes have called me bum, hoodlum, criminal. Some have even called me nigger. I imagine now they'll at least have to call me Dr. Nigger."

"To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea."

"I got the rebound and he tackled me. I know this is Sunday, but this is the wrong field."

"... It sucked. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't even shop. Actually that's not true. I had gotten this amazing Marni backless dress down at Barneys the day before-but I didn't go really crazy like normal."

"They may signify wealth, but they can actually mean so much more-like committment, family, and love. And there's nothing like a perfect diamond to remind you that you'll never be perfect - the truth is, all you can do is try."

"She didn't want to know how much Ray had paid for it because that had nothing to do with its real value."

"All the boys in rehab are totally available because their girlfriends have all given up on them. It's fantastic."

"Oh my god. I just hung around with an unpretty person. Excuse me while I go home to scrub myself with expensive body wash and a pink loofah, to rid myself of the unpretty germs."

"When you grow up in Bel Air and shop only in expensive boutiques on Rodeo and Robertson, you develop a kind of allergy to anything unpretty -clothes, cars... even people... you start thinking that if you hang around unattractive people, their homeliness can be contagious."

"Guys are so transparent most of the time. Unless, of course, they're dating you, in which case they are utter mysteries."

"I'm bustier now, and I really don't like it. It doesn't really fit with my wardrobe, it's not who I am. I am not someone who is used to wearing a bra or having to wear a bra I really don't like it. I like wearing vintage hippy see-through shirts that aren't slutty on me because there's nothing to look at. Now I have boobs so I can't really wear it because it sends out a different message."

"I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't really thin at one point, because I was. But it had nothing to do with not eating. I'm not saying that I have more problems than everyone else, but people's weight fluctuates, and five or ten pounds is a lot on me."

"My plan was not to be a celebrity. My plan was to be a singer and an entertainer. I wanted to go to NYU, major in musical theater, do Broadway, and come out with an album. Unfortunately, I started fucking up when I was in my teens."

"It’s not me that’s obsessed with my weight, it’s everyone else. I know that I’m healthy, so I don’t really feel the need to answer to anyone. I’ve never substituted a meal for a salad in my life."

"I don’t trust valets, waiters — nobody. I don’t waste my time anymore trying to figure out who leaks things to the press."

"I’m very happy with my life and I wouldn’t take back any mistake I’ve made because it’s made me who I am today. I don’t walk around pretending that I’m perfect, so I don’t think that anyone else should hold me to that and not expect me to fuck up occasionally. Because I do, and you do, too."

"When my dad divorced my mom it was kind of like him leaving me also. I just really didn't understand why he wasn't returning my phone calls, or why I couldn't see him whenever I wanted to. That was the most hurtful thing to me."

"(on her DUI) I have a responsibility, and it's something that I did wrong, and if I could personally apologize to every single person that has lost a loved one from drunk driving I would. And unfortunately, I can't, but this is my way of paying my dues and taking responsibility and being an adult."

"The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future."

"You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the Internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is "Don't ever, ever try to lie to the Internet – because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.""

"I'd like to thank Sony for their gracious hospitality, and for not repeatedly punching me in the face. If I seem a little nervous, it's because Kevin Butler was introduced to me backstage as the VP of sharpening things."

"C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."

"This isn't working."

"The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted."

"The original Half-Life took two years to create and Half-Life 2 took six years. That means Half-Life 3 would ship in approximately 2022. By which time we'll all be retired. With episodic content we can answer everybody's questions about what happened at the end of Half-Life 2, and we can do it in 18 months rather than 18 years."

"George Lucas should have distributed the "source code" to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius."

"We're way closer to The Matrix than people realize, It's not going to be The Matrix—The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain-computer interface world is going to be.It turns out that your brain has really good interfaces for some things and really badly designed, kludge-y interfaces for doing other things. And, the fact that your immune systems gets involved in your perceptions of temperature means there are all sorts of weird parts of your brain that participate in the sensation of being cold, whereas things like your motor cortex or your visual cortex are much more tractable problems. And that's what I mean. We're going to learn a lot as we proceed as to what things work and what things don't, what things are valuable to people and what things are party tricks that don't really matter in the long run ... I think that it's an extinction-level event for every entertainment form that's not thinking about this."

"The real world will feel dull, flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains. ...People are going to decide for themselves if they want to do it"

"James is an ass, and we won't be working with him again."

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty."

"There was another major phase of split-brain research where we studied the patients as a way of getting at the other questions very much alive in neuroscience, everything from questions about visual midline overlap to spatial attention and resource allocations. At this point the split-brain patients provided a way of examining cortical-subcortical relationships, and other matters."

"Mindfulness is defined as nonjudgmental, investigative, kind, and responsive awareness. This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind."

"The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along."

"The next phase of the work was when Joseph LeDoux and I came up with the idea of the interpreter. Twenty-five years into studying these patients we finally got around to asking the patients, "Why did you do that?" after they had a response with the left hand that was being governed by the separated, silent, speechless right hemisphere. We began to understand that the left hemisphere "made up" a story as to why the patient did what he/she did, and in that moment we began to see the cardinal feature of the left hemisphere: the ability to interpret actions generated outside its realm of conscious awareness."

"Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way they wish it were, are on the path to freedom."

"The Dalai Lama is rumored to have said that being able to have sex without any attachment would take the level of attainment of being able to eat either chocolate cake or dog shit without any preference between the two."

"With mindfulness we have the choice of responding with compassion to the pain of craving, anger, fear and confusion. Without mindfulness we are stuck in the reactive pattern and identification that will inevitably create more suffering and confusion."

"Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others."

"Everything is impermanent—every pleasure, every pain, every body. But the survival instincts crave permanence and control. The body wants pleasure to stay forever and pain to go away forever."

"Recovery is also the ability to inhabit the conditions of the present reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant."