“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told... [More]”

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a... [More]”

“The question shouldn’t be why do so many people fall through the cracks; rather, it should be why are there so many cracks in the first place?”

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals… We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err… They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves within the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are... [More]”

“The history of philosophy is the history of very tempting mistakes made by very smart people, and if you don’t learn that history you’ll make those mistakes again and again and again. One of the ignoble joys of my life is watching very smart scientists just reinvent all the second-rate philosophical ideas because they’re very tempting until you pause, take a deep breath and take them apart.”

“No man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points if the two points will stand... [More]”

“Please don’t confuse my intensity with disrespect.”

“One crazy man can block the well, but it takes the whole village to remove the stone.”

“Absinthe: for when it’s Friday night and you don’t have to be anywhere ‘til Tuesday.”

Bronn: The little king’s backed up; clogged from balls to brains
Tyrion: Do you think dipping his wick will cure what ails him?
Bronn: There’s no cure for being a cunt[1]

“My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.”

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.”

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

“People will be expecting me to be funny already. Funny already. A test I’ve failed many times. “Hey, there’s the comedian. He doesn’t seem funny.” No shit. Because I’m trippin’ out, man. Here you are surrounded by those you know well. And here I am, fish outta water struggling to breathe. Tell you what…you be funny now. I’ll be quiet. A quiet guy is not necessarily unfunny. Think of Charlie Chaplin. The space shuttle soars through space. But most of the time it’s parked.... [More]”

“For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as... [More]”

“If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top […] that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.”

“You people have awful prices for CDs. $35 for a fucking CD? That’s awful. Why is anyone going to buy any music at [those] kind of prices? When you see shit like that, burn the record store down and steal the shit. That’s what I think you should do. And if you see any of my CDs at that price and you can steal the shit online? Do it. I’d rather be heard than paid. Fuck it.”

“Yet Dildo Cay is bad in ways that surpass its title. The product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, the novel’s prose is so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion.”

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains”

“The mark of greatness is when everything that came before is obsolete and everything that comes after bears your mark.”

“You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.”

“A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then the world went mad.”

“Never trust a [programming] language where its users won’t tell you that it sucks.”

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”