Agnostics From The United States

"If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station."

"Those who write about life, reflect about life…. you see in others who you are."

"Life is a tragedy full of joy."

"It was all those biographies in me yelling, “We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.”"

"… keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others."

"If I may, I would at this point urge young writers not to be too much concerned with the vagaries of the marketplace. Not everyone can make a first-rate living as a writer, but a writer who is serious and responsible about his work, and life, will probably find a way to earn a decent living, if he or she writes well. A good writer will be strengthened by his good writing at a time, let us say, of the resurgence of ignorance in our culture. I think I have been saying that the writer must never compromise with what is best in him in a world defined as free."

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall."

"I think I said "All men are Jews except they don't know it." I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men."

"We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness."

"Without heroes, we're all plain people, and don't know how far we can go."

"I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own."

"Levin wanted friendship and got friendliness; he wanted steak and they offered spam."

"If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you."

"Mourning is a hard business," Cesare said. "If people knew there'd be less death."

"Wikipedia is so ironic. We wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but what emerged was one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history."

"I like and admire Larry very much. I actually think his role in the early days of Wikipedia is under-appreciated."

"[From concluding remarks on results from multiple search engines.] Look at it this way. Among the responses to searches on politically charged topics such as "Ukraine" and "gay marriage," there are boatloads of relevant pages, from a wide variety of sources, that I would want placed higher than just these. Why on earth should we constantly see Wikipedia, New York Times, Britannica, Vox, Pew, ABC News, CNN, etc., come up over and over and over again? I don't mean I want to see more of Fox, WSJ, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail. I mean, that wouldn't hurt, but that's not my point. I would like to see high-quality material (there is a lot) from the long tail of downranked websites. I saw the Epoch Times once, and the Federalist, Breitbart, and National Review never. There were very few relatively obscure websites."

"If you are an admin, or if you just have a lot of pull because you are popular because you have a lot of views and stroke the right backs, if you are in the in-crowd then you have a lot more authority in the system. It is mob rule and it has been since I left. Although it was become more organised in many ways. There is a veneer of rather strict bureaucracy – a set of rules and functions applied in an arbitrary way. You can detect a pattern, but it’s a political pattern. Not a principled pattern."

"The bias that they (Wikipedia) now reflect, is that of the Globalist Left. Of the Establishment, with a capital E."

"It is more than just a mob now. It is a mob in the sense that there is real internal political authority being wielded and no regularised fair, democratic way of determining who should have that authority. The arbitration committee elections are a joke. You cannot know, announce, reveal the identities of the most of administrators on Wikipedia... you don't know who those people are and if you don't know, there is no accountability. It is a self-contained system. If it just so happened that one of the leading administrators on Wikipedia is a convicted paedophile, sitting in prison right now, in some prison where they let prisoners use the internet, that does not make any difference because there is no way of finding that out. That bothers me. That does not make it a mob. What makes it a mob is the combination of lack of a fair democratic process of determining who those in charge would be and lack of a fair application of rules, there is no rule of law in Wikipedia. They try to make it look like there is since they keep citing these alphabets soup of acronyms which is short for policies, but the way in which these policies are applied is arbitrary."

"They seem not to realize that it is possible to dispute what the facts are, as if they were in all cases absolutely obvious."

"False balance... according to which on some topics the facts are known and if you actually try to let people make up their own minds by themselves by presenting one side and then another side in a balanced fashion then you are committing the sin of false balance, and wikipedia has absolutely abandoned the neutrality policy by endorsing that journalistic canard."

"One thing that i would recommend, go to Everipedia, edit the article about the Delhi riots: that would be really interesting if you do that, once it is developed give me a link to it and I would be curious to see how the article differs from the Wikipedia article."

"They have no class."

"I actually think that the mechanisms just of people acting like jerks and driving off decent people who want a neutral reference, that's enough to explain the bias"

"The best thing we can do basically is to supply alternatives and make them better and better and better."

"There is no rule of law in wikipedia... but the way that the policies are applied is absolutely arbitrary."

"A lot of mainstream news stories are broken only in Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—all of which are banned from use as sources by Wikipedia. Beyond that, many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly "radical"; they are still mainstream."

"It's become both opaque and centralized, centralized in the sense that the authority to participate in Wikipedia has been greatly restricted. You can be completely anonymous and even be a top-ranked Wikipedia user with administrator rights. So, they could be working for various corporations, various government spy agencies, maybe for criminal organizations."

"It's mob rule and it has been basically since I left."

"Jimmy Wales is right. We did originally adopt the neutrality policy to foster "a culture of thoughtful diplomatic honesty." In other words, the way to keep the peace among a radically diverse set of contributors is not to declare winners and losers. But that is only one reason we adopted the policy. There was another key reason: as I have explained, no one has a right to make up your mind for you, especially in an open, global project."

"Compare how Britannica and Wikipedia introduce the traditional system of Indian medicine called Ayerveda. Britannica is respectful. Wikipedia has no fewer than four dismissive epithets in the first paragraph: "quackery," "pseudoscientific," "protoscience," and "unscientific."... Not long ago, this article would have been regarded as a deep offense against multiculturalism. ... It is not the role of an encyclopedia to tell people what to think or to cast aspersions on entire cultures. ... Wikipedia should make *no* claims on its own behalf about what is (effective) medicine; that is not the role of an encyclopedia. It can repeat research on that though. ... You assume that you can detect what "modern medicine," or other scientific or scholarly work, really is, i.e., whether it actually passes muster of the scientific method. ... If the systems of peer review is screwed up, you can't. Nor if medical research is tainted by filthy lucre from Big Pharma. The world is considerably more complicated than the silly children at Wikipedia think it is. Britannica at least understands that much."

"There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length. Man makes plans, and God laughs."

"I wish they spend it in more sensible ways like they could be adding ... a feedback system for the public that does not require the public to actually interact with these insane wikipedians, that would be a start."

"It's harder to find a page where there *isn't* some glaringly obvious bias."

"Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia."

"Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years. Uh, ;-)"

"I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Wikipedia, you're still at it."

"Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)."

"I have learned that the people probably angriest at Wikipedia are Hindus... I am happy to point out the obvious, namely, that Wikipedia is biased... What you *would* accomplish, however, is to persuasively expose the anti-Hindu bias on Wikipedia."

"A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated."

"Basically, the Left tends to invade open institutions, it's been their modus-operandi for the last hundred years. Basically, invading open institutions and subverting them, dominating them, and freezing out anyone who dissents their views. I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious 10 years ago, now it's just embarrassing... Now there is an official view about pretty much everything..."

"Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month. In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles."

"I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong."

"If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that specialized subject. Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi."

"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become."

"Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense."

"Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain."

"There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable."

"A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both."