Quotes

• "Imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world" - Soren Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling"

7/12/10

• "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

3/9/10

• "we're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means." - Randall Munroe
• "There's never nothing going on."
  "Anger, hatred, violence are really all just fear. Fear, then, not money, is the root of all evil."
  "The people that are the hardest to love are usually the ones that need it the most."
  "Life is a mystery. Don't waste time trying to figure it out."
  "Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure." - Peaceful Warrior
• "To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness." - Bertrand Russell
• Act the way you want to feel. - Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
• "Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon." - Dalai Lama

6/25/09

• "If our children can be subjected to a TV show in which the hero is a serial killer, or in which semi-naked models are dressed as angels or the torture-du-jour on 24, they can probably survive a model rubbing a pumpkin against her torso." - Joseph Romm 1/29/09
• "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will... men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get." - Frederick Douglas, 1857
• "Wormholes are to black holes as elevators are to deep wells filled with snakes and poisoned spikes." - Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 5.14.09
• "[Kirsten Gillibrand's swing from conservative US Rep to liberal Senator is] a reminder, indeed, that with very few exceptions, electoral considerations bear far more firmly on a Congressperson's voting record than any sort of deep-seated personal convictions." - Nate Silver, 6.6.09
• "Neutrality as a condition of academic integrity is toxic." - Liz Coleman (President, Bennington College), Feb 2009

1/4/09

• "The police lights played through her mohawk like the sun setting through pine trees as she shoveled the third hooker into the trunk of the camry." -xkcd 147
• "That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through the window of our office building. Let's fucking do it and never look back." -xkcd 279
• "I'm glad Gore's using his profile to do what he's doing, but we need an army of Van Joneses behind him, who haven't been trained by a life in the D.C. glare to deal with the press from a defensive crouch. Americans need to see someone confidently telling them that this is what's going to save us, economically and environmentally. This is not pain they have to endure. It's a lifeboat off a sinking ship." - David Roberts 7/20/08
• "There's a long standing disconnect among Republicans rarely mentioned these days. The same party that implicitly assumes the government can and will responsibly manage nuclear weapons and trillion dollar wars, ridicules the idea that that same government could ever be entrusted to administer healthcare to uninsured children. Republican ideology holds that government is bad, and when they're running it, they're usually right."
  -DarkSyde, DailyKos 9/3/08
• "And so it is back to work. Oh yes, we can savor the moment for a while, for a few days, perhaps a week. But well before inauguration day we will need to be back on the job, in the community, in the streets, where democracy is made, demanding equity and justice in places where it hasn't been seen in decades, if ever. Because for all the talk of hope and change, there is nothing--absolutely, positively nothing--about real change that is inevitable. And hope, absent real pressure and forward motion to actualize one's dreams, is sterile and even dangerous. Hope, absent commitment is the enemy of change, capable of translating to a giving away of one's agency, to a relinquishing of the need to do more than just show up every few years and push a button or pull a lever. This means hooking up now with the grass roots organizations in the communities where we live, prioritizing their struggles, joining and serving with their constituents, following leaders grounded in the community who are accountable not to Barack Obama, but the people who helped elect him. Let Obama follow, while the people lead, in other words."
  - Tim Wise 11/5/08
• "When Obama promised change, he wasn't talking about plucking amateurs from outside government. He was talking about a change from incompetence and stagnation to competence and progress. The progress is in the agenda; the competence is in the staffing." - David Roberts, 12/11/08
• "Describing people who want cleaner energy as 'environmentalists' is like using 'feminists' when 'women' would do." - Nate Silver, 12/24/08 (paraphrased)

8/7/07

• "If you see a guy wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, ask him what part of America he's from."
• "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection of a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein
• "I love the smell of pus in the morning... it smells like...victory." - Greg House
• Guy #1: I'd totally hit that.
  Guy #2: Dude, I'd hit that so hard whoever could pull me out would become the King of England.
  -Overheard in New York (the website)
• "They say the first thing you should do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. But if there's one thing the coal industry loves, it's digging." - The Guardian
• "Hey, Murray, screw you, and screw your corrupt, vicious, law-breaking, public-teat-sucking, mountain-blowing-up, working-poor-killing, planet-destroying dinosaur of an industry. The sooner the world is rid of you the better. Crawl back under your rock." - David Roberts to a persecuted-feeling coal industry CEO
• Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
  A: 6. Two to hold the giraffe, and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.
• Please be advised of visiting:
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QUOTES YOINKED FROM FRIENDS:

• Ariel, via HEATER:
• "I hit is intransitive. I hit women is transitive."
• "Wait a sec, you're being indecisive about making someone feel guilty...do you have challah in the oven?"
• DAVE:
• Mike Patterson: "Owen, God hates you." "Yeah, that's 'cause I fuck his mom."
• Glenn: "Pistols at dawn? Naw, I'm not gonna be up at dawn. How about you just come in and shoot me in the face in my bed at dawn? I'll just leave the door unlocked."
• Julia in a nutshell: "Awwww, it's a big burrito of love!"
• OWEN:
• Stef: "There are 10 types of people in this world--those who understand binary, and those who have friends."
• Owen: "This is where you say something insulting and leave, right?" Glenn: "...I like your stapler." [He leaves.]

12/9/06

• Friendly people make life worth living.
• A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.
• "The Republican National Committee announced today that the Republican Party is changing its emblem from an elephant to a condom. The committee chairman explained that the condom more clearly reflects the party's stance today, because a condom accepts inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually getting fucked."
• "Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses." - Confucius
• "Sorry I'm late"
  "That's okay, time doesn't exist"
  -Slacker
• "Unexpected acts of love are the best thing in the world to receive, and therefore the best thing in the world to give as well."
• "God gave men a brain and a penis and only enough blood to run one at a time" -Robin Williams
• "Voila! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V."
• Aye, fight and you may die, run, and you'll live... at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!
• "...we will call this land...This Land..."
  "Maybe we should call it your grave!"
  "Agh, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
  "Hahahaha, mine is an evil laugh!"
  
• "Making young boys be reasonable just gives them pimples." -Lwaxana Troi