People From New York City

"Assault weapons were designed for and should be used on our battlefields, not on our streets. There is no inalienable right to own and operate 100-round clips on AR-15 assault rifles."

"President Trump turned away from not one but two bipartisan compromises. Each would have averted this shutdown....It is something the majority could have avoided entirely, a concern the president could have obivated, if he were only willing to take yes for an answer."

"I’ve stayed interested in Hamilton not because he was a standard-issue hero, but because of his complications; he was self-destructive, had a highly problematic personality, and was often extreme in his politics. I don’t like hero history. It does the study of history a disservice on a thousand different levels. It’s far more interesting to study complicated people and the history they helped to shape."

"If you don't know your history, you don't know who you are. Holds true for nations too."

"I want to offer a little ode to the importance of studying history. We’ve seen the assertion of “alternative facts” – meaning, essentially, a denial of actual facts. We’ve see the proliferation of “fake news,” along with the suggestion that it’s impossible to differentiate between “real” and “fake” news. Studying history responsibly does some handy things. It compels you to confront and consider ugly realities as part of a bigger picture. Studying history compels you to investigate, evaluate, compare, and analyze evidence to help you piece together ACTUAL facts. And in teaching people to evaluate evidence in search of facts, it trains them to logically analyze and interpret news for themselves. [F]or those insisting that the humanities has no value, we are getting daily examples of how the study of history offers practical tools for understanding not only the past, but the present."

"For art, the intervention of capital always signals a further degree of mediation. To say that art is commodified is to say that a mediation, or standing-in-between, has occurred, & that this betweenness amounts to a split, & that this split amounts to "alienation". Improv music played by friends at home is less "alienated" than music played "live" at the Met, or music played through media (whether PBS or MTV or Walkman). In fact, an argument could be made that music distributed free or at cost on cassette via mail, is less alienated than live music played at some huge We Are The World spectacle or Las Vegas niteclub, even though the latter is live music played to a live audience (or at least so it appears), while the former is recorded music consumed by distant & even anonymous listeners."

"Everything delicate & beautiful, from Surrealism to Breakdancing, ends up as fodder for McDeath's ads; 15 minutes later, all the magic has been sucked out, & the art itself dead as a dried locust."

"Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen."

"You gotta go do research on the way they treat like fucking chickens, man. Those chickens go through fucking torture before they’re processed and shit, have all sorts of fucking steroids injected in them and everything."

"She was not listening. If she listened she would have to hear uncomfortable truths."

"He had leaped into the embrace of self-delusion. There was a lot of that going around."

"I tend toward the cynical view where religion is concerned."

"A sign of advancing age. You start obsessing about how much you have to get done in the time that you have left."

"I felt wonderfully wicked. I always do when I frustrate overly powerful, responsible-to-no-one types who think all existence was created only for their pleasure and exploitation."

"Generating rumors is one thing even the most inept armed force does exceedingly well."

"It proved to be much farther than I had hoped. It always is when you are running away."

"There was one temporal power greater than the greatest sorcery. Greed."

"I reminded myself that Khang Phi is bereft of arms. That the monks abhor violence. That they always yield to strength, then seduce it with reason and wisdom. Yes, sometimes it does take a while."

"Baladitya understands that in addition to being foreign territory the past is, as history, a hall of mirrors that reflect the needs of souls observing from the present. Absolute fact serves the hungers of only a few disconnected people. Symbol and faith serve the rest."

"This is what happens when you get old. You start thinking. Worse, you start telling everybody what you think."

"I did not expect them to try anything but I am alive at my age because I make a habit of being ready for trouble when it seems most unlikely."

"There are several huge monasteries—of which Khang Phi is the greatest—dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. The monks do not sort it into good and evil knowledge, nor do they make moral judgments. They take the position that no knowledge is evil until someone chooses to do evil with it."

"She—and I—were of an age now where we spent too much time wondering how things might have gone had we made a few different choices."

"She had a full measure of youth’s indifference to the past."

"There are, of course, a thousand sophistries spewed by those who wish to deny individuals the opportunity to choose. Which is an arrogant presumption of a divine scale."

"Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance."

"No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don’t believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness."

"The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you."

"If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years."

"“Used to be” is not worth the breeze on which it is scribbled."

"Hatreds seldom are constrained to rational scales."

"An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation, being chased by people with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that, playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop. Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people."

"I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much."

"Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true."

"Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable."

"And there went some good old-fashioned wishful thinking, Sleepy. We were talking about human beings. If there is any way to be contrary, unreasonable and obnoxious, human beings are sure to find and pursue it. With verve and enthusiasm at whatever might be the most inconvenient time."

"“When you get back to Taglios now, Master, you can establish a mighty reputation by explaining the myths in the words of a being who lived through their creation.” Santaraksita smiled sourly, “You know better, Dorabee. Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.” He had a point. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs. And that is a truth upon which you can rely."

"He was pursuing a running debate with his own guilts and ghosts—unless he was spouting proverbs and aphorisms, most of the meanings fairly obvious but a few convolute and obscure. He was particularly fond of “Fortune smiles. And then betrays.” He just could not get into bed comfortably with the truth that he had made that bed himself. He still had difficulty separating “ought to be” from “the way things really are.”"

"Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out."

"“We’re still the Black Company. We still don’t leave our own behind.” Which was never strictly true but you do have to serve an ideal the best you can, lest it become debased. A law as ancient as coinage itself says bad money will drive out good. The same is true of principles, ethics and rules of conduct. If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possible remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand. You must do what you know to be right. And you do know. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you do know and you are just making excuses because the right thing is so hard, or just inconvenient."

"Soldiers live. And wonder why."

"I sped a prayer heavenward. God needs to be reminded."

"The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it."

"You might have noticed that the human animal is fond of forming and clinging to prejudices, remaining their steadfast curator in the face of all reason and contradiction."

"You can be screamingly blind to the obvious if you don’t realize that you have not opened up all the doors of your mind."

"Peace had broken out and was being enthusiastically exploited on the presumption that it could not possibly last."

"Beneath my breath I continued my conversation with God. As usual, He did not trouble Himself to defend His Works to me. My fault for being a woman."

"Not dangerous at all. Not even that lucky. But a sufficiently paranoid mind will discern patterns and threats where only fortune has conspired."

"It looks like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every single branch on the way down."

"Life is never like a canal, flowing gently through a straightforward and predictable channel. It is more like a mountain brook, zigging and zagging, tearing things up, sometimes going almost dormant before taking an unexpected and turbulent turn."