no. 482

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

G. B. Shaw 

no. 470

"The GOP is so lacking in anything like a legitimate moral center that the most immoral asshole in the room is going to be your standard bearer. Congratulations on nearly eight years of delegitimizing the presidency and several decades of saying that government itself is bad. You've finally gotten your perfect candidate."

The Rude Pundit, "Note to Republican Voters Post-New Hampshire: Are You Really This Dumb?", Feb 10, 2016

Make that, "perfect president".

no. 448

Which explains why really getting something right seems like such an awesome victory.

no. 424

"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

W.T. Shedd

no. 408

"If you still dream about having a Rolex when you turn 50, your life failure".

Boulet, responding to French publicist Jaques Seguela, who said "If you dont own a Rolex when you turn 50, your life is a failure", while defending the purchase of a 13,000 Euro Rolex by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

no. 397

"Ed Ochester has a poem that goes something like (paraphrasing, including the spacing):

A retired miner in Dr. Cappaletti's office, crippled and wheezing:

"If someone tells you he
got rich from
hard work ask him
whose."

Might be from his book Dancing on the Edges of Knives."


junior, commenting at Gin And Tacos

no. 395

You cannot call yourself pro-liberty, even including the word in your name, if you are unwilling to recognize that the greatest oppressive force opposing freedom in America is unregulated greed. Libertarianism is a philosophy for the well-off, the privileged, and those who dream someday of being a wealthy boss with power over the peons. When capital is the measure of success, those who have it thrive at the expense of those who don’t; when we don’t have redistribution of wealth, we do not have equality of opportunity.

The US is already a libertarian paradise, and look what it gets us: a widening gap between rich and poor, a rotting infrastructure as the exploiters look for short term gains while neglecting services vital to those who can’t afford a limousine service, a corrupt and decadent privileged class, and thriving new political parties that are simply nuts. To use one of Ayn Rand’s favorite words, this country is infested with looters: only they’re not the poor, they’re not the mythical “welfare queens”, they’re bankers and obscenely overpaid executives and corporations that demand the right to buy elections.

And there stand the libertarians, the useful idiots who cheer them on.

P. Z. Myers, So I Invented a New Law the Other Day

stolen whole cloth from Rational Rant, who knows a thing or two about quotes.

no. 369

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

no. 368

“This is the rule I always give myself: that nothing new can come from a situation that involves being free or that doesn’t involve suffering.”

Rei Kawakubo

no. 362

"This is a generation that sees everything they do wrong as someone else's fault but everything that happens to other people as a matter of personal responsibility. Reading a tale of hard working, well intentioned people getting reamed by a corrupt system even as they work themselves to literal death might be an eye-opener. Sure, it will sail right over the heads of some of them. I feel, though, that the understanding that the world is not fair, life is hard, and getting by is often a tremendous struggle is a necessary precondition to having meaningful political attitudes. The idea that everything that happens to individuals in our society is their own fault poisons our entire culture, from our politics to our communities. People like Sinclair saw through this over a century ago, but somewhere along the way we chose to forget."

Ed, at Gin And Tacos, from the article "The Hand of Fate".

no. 358

David Mitchell

via

no. 344

“If you’re gonna bail, bail early. This applies to relationships, college classes, and sledding.”

Advice from my high school science teacher, Mr. Miller (via mumfordslionheart)

no. 332

"It's freeing to fail and realize that you didn't die."

Tina Fey

via

no. 314

"[W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it."

bell hooks, where we stand: Class Matters, chapter 4

via

no. 312

"Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t."

Steve Maraboli

via

no. 310

no. 308

"If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got, and you’ll always feel what you always felt."

Unknown

via

no. 307

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Groucho Marx

via

no. 297

"The invisible hand does indeed allocate the efforts of private industry to the best possible uses, as long as 'best' and 'most profitable' can be used interchangeably."

Gin and Tacos, from the post Better Living Through Chemistry, or: Thanks, Free Market!

no. 292

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

via