Bloggers From The United States

"“Harry!” Boutin said. “Nice guy. Didn’t know he was that smart. He hid it well.”"

"You are sufficiently like me to officially be interesting."

"“You and I don’t actually need to be here for this,” I said to the goat. The goat didn’t respond, but I could tell she agreed with me."

"“Every creature has fear,” Jared said. “Even the non-conscious ones.” “No,” Boutin said. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it’s not the same thing. Fear isn’t the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential."

"“I didn’t say that,” Szilard said, in a tone that implied that perhaps he had."

"When power is within reach, few will wait patiently for it."

"Jared, allow me to share with you my philosophy of human beings. It can be summed up in four words: I like good people."

"No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair."

"Those people you saw—the realborn—are born without a plan. They’re born because biology tells humans to make more humans; but it doesn’t consider what to do with them after that. Realborn go for years without the slightest clue what they’re going to do with themselves. From what I understand, some of them never actually figure it out. They just walk through life in a daze and then fall into their graves at the end of it. Sad. And inefficient."

"That’s physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry."

"Some people are just no good at not being in charge."

"Rationality is not one of humanity’s strong points."

"I’m not sure I like their plan for converting us to their religion, seeing as it involves dying and all."

"“Obviously, the Rraey have some way to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where our ships are going to skip. How do they do that?” “I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to,” I said. “That’s exactly right. But they do anyway. So, quite obviously, our model of how skipping works is wrong. Theory gets thrown out the window when observation proves it isn’t so. The question now is what is really going on.”"

"In this universe, experience counts."

"“I’m not insane, sir,” I said. “I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”"

"I had never seen so many old people in one place at one time. Neither had Harry. “It’s like Wednesday morning at the world’s biggest Denny’s,” he said."

"What’s the point of being in charge if you can’t indulge in pointless favoritism."

"“It’s Charlie’s soul,” he repeated. “Or more accurately, it’s a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin.”"

"The recruit was Sam McCain; in one of our lunch sessions I recalled Sarah O’Connell describing him as more mouth than brain. Unsurprisingly, he’d been in sales most of his life."

"(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else."

"The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”"

"Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think - and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking - that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love." When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.""

"The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time. You can’t stop aging. Gene therapies and replacement organs and plastic surgery give it a good fight. But it catches up with you anyway. Get a new lung, and your heart blows a valve. Get a new heart, and your liver swells up to the size of an inflatable kiddie pool. Change out your liver, a stroke gives you a whack. That’s aging’s trump card; they still can’t replace brains."

"Human technology was good, and weapon to weapon humans were as well-equipped as the vast majority of their adversaries. But the weapon that ultimately matters is the one behind the trigger."

"Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults."

"When you control communication, you can hide anything you want."

"Jason Scott is an arrogant, self-impressed idiot who thinks he's god's gift to techies because he remembers "the golden days" of BBS's."

"Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Wikipedia articles should be written. Like wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders."

"[Yahoo!] found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse."

"So you can be a historian and also be an asshole."

"“Google is a library or archive like a supermarket is a food museum.”"

"Make it so easy you can't say no."

"Now think about every object you touch — your phone, a dish, a cup, a book, your laptop, your shirt. Imagine that each object were sacred, precious, a deeply valuable gift. Imagine that they were as valuable as your eyeballs. Now imagine treating this object with the kind of care and respect you'd treat your own eyeballs with. Would this change how you treat things?"

"I read because I love the experience, because it is a powerful teacher of life, because it transforms me."

"We can create a fearless life by living daily out of our comfort zone, and in the deliciousness of uncertainty."

"At this point, is the average person boarding a plane more fearful of Al Qaeda or TSA?"

"Ta-Nehisi is speaking to us from Washington, D.C., where he testified yesterday, and he’s speaking in front of an image of the Capitol, which was built by enslaved people. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer-in-residence at New York University, author of a number of books, including We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, that includes his “Case Against [sic] Reparations”—his “Case for Reparations.” We’ll be back with Ta-Nehisi in a minute."

"The rich world, for the most part, pretty much ignores these calls, dismissing it all as ancient history, much as the U.S. government manages to disregard calls for slavery reparations from African Americans (though in the spring of 2014, the calls grew distinctly louder, thanks to breakthrough reporting by The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, which once again rekindled the debate)."

"Well, I think I should say before I say that, my understanding is that Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40. I think that’s where we are now. So I’m obviously pretty pleased about that."

"I think all of the things that Bernie Sanders... listed about paying attention to distressed communities should be done. And we should also have reparations. So, I don’t see those two things as in conflict. It’s not clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda. In fact, it was never clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda, why one can’t associate themselves with the massive gaps in the wealth, that don’t just exist in the African-American community, but exist in communities across the country, and at the same time recognize that there’s something specific about the gap in the African-American community that’s tied to the specificity of American history. But, you know, as I said, I’m happy Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40."

"A large portion of this country... want to see somebody who can beat Trump. I get that. And there is, you know, a feeling, I think, among certain people that Joe Biden can out-white-man Donald Trump.... I get that beating Donald Trump is extremely, externally important. I get that. But I just hope that that’s the floor and not the ceiling."

"We feared [Ryland's Hounds] and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake. (p. 57)"

"I think when you have somebody who is celebrating their relationship, the ability of a person who saw no problem depriving an entire population of African Americans in their state of the right to vote, the right to participate as American citizens, the fact that that person was polite to them?... And so, I don’t know what is going on in your brain where you decide to celebrate the fact these people were polite."

"[A white person] was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave."

"You know, Joe Biden says that he’s been involved with civil rights his entire career. It’s worth remembering Joe Biden opposed busing and bragged about it, you know, in the 1970s. Joe Biden is on the record as being to the right of actually the New Democrats in the 1990s on the issue of mass incarceration, wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails. And so, you know, I’m not surprised. I mean, this is who Joe Biden is."

"So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft."

"And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about."

"Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty."

"Mitch McConnell... does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people."