rigorousintuition.ca

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. quotes:
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values…and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States – and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. quotes:
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it absolutely vile!

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. quotes:
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. quotes:
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. quotes:
We are what we pretend to be.

'We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap.' -Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"Unfortunately there's not actually a word to describe me so I have to express myself through the medium of the dance." Magda Szubanski, Aus comedienne

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., quotes about Technology:
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Alice Kahn, quotes about Technology:
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press 3.

"In 'Birth Of A Nation', did we get an 'innie', or an 'outtie'?" -harry ashburn

"I wanted to be a philosopher, but I couldn't pass the metaphysical." -harry ashburn

"efforts to replicate Oswalds magic bullet for military application in the field have never been successful"

Jack Blood in the "from this day in history" news.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., quotes about Centralization:
We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols.

"You know your porn career is really over when they start calling you 'The 'legendary' _________ _________ .'"

— An Unnamed "Legendary" Porn Star

“The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist,” Pilger noted, “partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves.”

John Pilger, in 2009 re: Obama

There is only one interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre. The cinema flashes on to a screen images from the past. As this is what the mind does to itself all through life, the cinema seems intimately real. Of course, it is nothing of the sort—it is a satisfying and enjoyable extension of the unreality of everyday perception. The theatre, on the other hand, always asserts itself in the present. This is what can make it more real than the normal stream of consciousness. This is also what can make it so disturbing.

Peter Brook (quoted by the quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu).

WATER is to Coca-Cola as clean energy is to BP.

--Jeff Seabright, Coca-Cola's manager of environmental affairs, when asked about the firm's new global water strategy.

The Economist, Oct 2005

You gotta free your feet before you can free your mind. -Bill Django

Ayn Rand quotes:
Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government.

Ayn Rand quotes:
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Ayn Rand quotes:
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system.

Ayn Rand quotes:
It is a policeman’s duty to protect men from criminals -- criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property -- then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.