Quote Only Thread

[Elihu]

Paul Begala quotes:
Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.

[The Consul]

In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.
- John Millington Synge

[Simulist]

"If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work:

'Hello. Can't work today. Still queer.'"

— Robin Tyler, US Gay Rights Activist

[wintler2]

“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”
—George Eliot / Mary Ann Evans

[ida pingala]

31 ¶ Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This
great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before
thee; and the form thereof was terrible.
32 This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his
arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,
33 His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.
34 Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands,
which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and
clay, and brake them to pieces.
35 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the
gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff
of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them
away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that
smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the
whole earth.

-Book of Daniel ch. 31-35.

[Simulist]

"Homophobia: the fear that gay men will treat you the way you treat women, and that a lesbian will treat 'your woman' better than you do." — Anonymous

[Searcher08]

The test of activism in 2012 is going to come down to two questions. Is it decentralizing? So does it serve the interest of decentralization, or does it serve the interests of centralization? And is it wealth-building or wealth-destroying? Because what we need is activism that is both decentralizing and wealth-building.
- Catherine Austin Fitts

[Elihu]

"What good is he? If he can't beat the bumbling Texas Governor, what good is he?" - Ralph Nader

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

"Cultural Man has been on earth for some 2.000.000 years; for over 99% of this period he has lived as a hunter-gatherer. Only in the last 10.000 years has man begun to domesticate plants and animals, to use metals, and to harness energy resources other than the human body (...) To date, the hunting way of life has been the most succesful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved. Nor does this evaluation exclude the present precarious existence under the threat of nuclear annihilation and the population explosion. It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself. If he fails in this task, interplanetary archeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of smallscale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instanteneous efflorescence of technology and society leading rapidly to extinction. 'Stratigraphically', the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear as essentially simultaneous." - Lee and DeVore, in: Man the Hunter, Chicago: 1973.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

"Thanks to the work of numerous scholars in several fields, it has come to light that female humans have been the chief engine in the unprecedentedly high level of human sociability. (They) were the inventors of the most useful tools. (They) shared equally in the provision of food for human societies. (They) almost certainly drove the human invention of language. And (they) were the ones who created agriculture." - Adovasio, Soffer and Page, in: The Invisible Sex. Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, 2007

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

"Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, `You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons." - Genesis 3:1-7 RSV

[Laodicean]

People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, why should I be so confident of my own immunity?

One can be resolved to promote good, or one can be resolved to be a good person - two separate things that are mutually exclusive.

How much frankness can we stand in a friend?

I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.

A crisis is a productive state. You simply have to get rid of its aftertaste of catastrophe.

- Max Frisch

[Simulist]

“Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”

― Sue Monk Kidd

[Simulist]

"Claiming that someone else's marriage is against your religion is like being angry at somebody for eating a donut because you're on a diet."

— Seth Rogan

[justdrew]