“Pretending to be crazy works really well until you run into someone pretending to be sane.”

“When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane”

“Though we could become learned by other men’s learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom.”

“He who is tired of Weird Al is tired of life.”

“When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

“Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis”

“From the moment that they form part of a crowd, the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.”

“One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”

“As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

“To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.”

“The Greatest Obstacle to Discovery Is Not Ignorance—It Is the Illusion of Knowledge.”

““The Law of Implicit Interfaces”: Given enough use, there is no such thing as a private implementation. That is, if an interface has enough consumers, they will collectively depend on every aspect of the implementation, intentionally or not. This effect serves to constrain changes to the implementation, which must now conform to both the explicitly documented interface, as well as the implicit interface captured by usage. We often refer to this phenomenon as “bug-for-bug compatibility.””

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

“We live in an oligarchy, but with the humidity, it feels like a dictatorship.”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“Lyndon B. JohnsonWe have rescued a magnificent and meaningful treasure from the chainsaw. For once, we have spared what is enduring and ennobling from the hungry and the hasty and the selfish act of destruction. The redwoods will stand because the men and women of vision and courage made their stand, refusing to suffer any further exploitation of our national wealth, and greater damage to our environment or any larger debasement of that quality and beauty without which life itself is quite barren.”

“Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American. Go even further: try to imagine at least once a day that you belong to the vast, the overwhelming majority of people on this planet who don’t have passports, don’t live in dwellings equipped with both refrigerators and telephones, who have never even once flown in a plane.”

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass. [1]”

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

“The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.”

“I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it, than vote for something I don’t want and get it.”

“It is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions; instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.”

“We have become a civilization based on work itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care or assistance from their communities. It’s as if we’ve collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.”

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

“Around the mid-1800s humanity began to notice it doesn’t make sense for a small group of rich people to own everything and for everyone else to continually give that group labor, rent and expenses just to stay alive, and ever since then the media, the mainstream culture and the foreign policy of the ruling class have been intensely devoted to aggressively erasing this realization from humanity’s memory.”

“Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead. [1]”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

“There are two way of constructing a software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors . The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.”

“To some, complexity equals power. […] Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.”

“As we say in Ireland: If we fight, we might win. If we don’t fight, we’ve lost already.”

“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”

“I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.”

“[…] most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you − anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”

“There is no secret. Just practice twice as much as you think you need to.”

“Propaganda is the art of moving people’s thoughts and opinions in a desired direction for reasons they believe to be entirely their own.”

“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others.

“Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression.

“Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people.

“Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”

“Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”

“Se non è vero, è ben trovato.”

“A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants.”

“Justice will not come until those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.”

“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”

“History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense. Turning the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation. The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether.”

“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation’s problems would be another 100-Year War.”

“My demon is on my butt. My demon talks to me in profanity like a seller, and my demon tries to knock me down, and my demon tries to put me on a hell ride.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

“I apologize for such a long letter—I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

“Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!

“Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.

“Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest.

“With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?”

“We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor—both black and white, here and abroad”

“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.”

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.”

“Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed.

“Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion.

“When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as ‘appeasement,’ if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.”

“La personalité commence là où la comparaison se termine.”

“Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.”

“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.”

“My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers—the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being “reamed out” by managers—are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done.”

“We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth.”

“Irony [is] the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.”

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

“War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”

“Absolutely nothing should be sold for a profit if its absence could kill you. Any modern system where people still die from lack of these resources should be dismantled.”

“God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.”

“I am offended that you think we’re dumb enough to believe that you’re dumb enough to believe that.”

“The greatest barrier to communication is the illusion of it in the mind of the sender.”

“And that’s why we have to be committed to being certain kinds of persons, no matter what the possibilities are for triumph. We have a chance of a snowball in Hell of fighting for freedom. We fight anyway, because it’s right and because it’s just. And we just get crushed when we get crushed, but we get crushed with a smile.”

“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”

“Keep Fighting.”

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.”

“[…] the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. […] Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”

“It is only through difference that progress can be made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication–that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from any culture, but of losing all originality.”

“Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people’s suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it’s untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.”

“The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off”

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

“Kill one man, and you are a murderer.
Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror.
Kill them all, and you are a god.”

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an Arctic crystal.”

“Liberalism considered it proper for a capitalist to say to a worker, ‘You shall die of hunger,’ but improper for a worker to retort, ‘You shall die first, of a bullet. […] It is ridiculous to make a distinction between these two threats.”

“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party…and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt − until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions–poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed–which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.”

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.”

“Everyone is self-centered; the radius differs.”

“There’s this famous story about Sonny Barger, the old Hells Angel who woke up from a coma after a motorcycle accident. And the nurse said to him, “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Mr. Barger.” He said, “Yes, I did.” And she said, “What’s that?” He said, “I can do anything and survive.””

“This is a well-known internet phenomenon: The best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question, but to confidently assert the wrong answer.”

“As soon as a man does something admirable, the entire universe conspires to see that he never does it again.”

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must at least have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.”

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

“Diplomacy is the art of building ladders to allow people to climb down gracefully.”

“Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a manner that they look forward to the trip.”

“Maybe the greatest miracle is memory”

“You suffer from the arrogance of ignorance.”

“Yours is like all fortunes, Shadow: opaque on arrival, inevitable in retrospect.”

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind — that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort.”

“The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. [1]”

“[in America] the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”

“Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, dass Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.”

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

“Writing is a way of revealing the contradictions of life that one would like to resolve. Writing fiction, like poetry, means simply to display those contradictions but not necessarily to resolve them. In fact, the reader, through his interpretive cooperation, decides what the story means.”

“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.”

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

“[…] getting along in society includes some recognition of not being the worst person you can be even though you have a right to do so.”

“When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I’d love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.”

“The cause of poverty is not that we’re unable to satisfy the needs of the poor, it’s that we’re unable to satisfy the greed of the rich.”

“You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest… most foolish failing there is,”

“Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.”

“Did the lights just change? Yeah? Good. I don’t mind if that happens. I just want it to happen for everyone.”

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

“It’s as if the movie satisfied an impossible yet basic human desire to see what our parents were like before we were born and to see what they did that affected what we became—not to hear about it, or to read about it, as we can in novels, but actually to see it.”

“He was a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks”

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“To make your passing easier on loved ones, why not be an asshole your whole life?”

“I think we’ve found the weakness of capitalism: it believes its own grandiose bullshit.”

“America: You can’t get mad at us for what we do because we haven’t thought about the consequences.”

“I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy’, not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges.”

“Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed, and are not does, rage arise.”

“At sea, a fellow comes out,”

“There’s nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. [1]”

“Unlike the Europeans, Americans have never hated the rich, only envied them.”

“Like all reasonable people, I hate all Muslims. Except the ones I’ve met. They seem fine.”

“The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community—and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion—when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged. (Emphasis added.)”

“And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“There’s been a class war going on for decades and it’s time the bottom 80% of us got fucking pissed off, with or without a permit.”

“I’m almost 60. I’m 56, so I’ve got a few more years. It’s not old, it’s not young, it’s not anything, but it’s not 20.

“Unless you keep some amount of intensity and anger with it, whatever that is, where you’re like, I’m getting up today, I’m going for it, what are you angry at? Whatever it is, bring it on. I gotta be a little mad at it … to get through it. I have never been able to lose that. What I have done to displace some of that ambient rage is … work on my skills. The sharper the scalpel, I don’t need to take the whole forest down, I can just take those two trees down. I don’t want to relax because I know myself: I’ll just go fallow. I’d rather have the intensity, the nerves and the stress that comes with and perhaps the shortened lifespan from always being (seizes up and squeezes eyes shut) inside.”

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest ‘mission civilisatrice.’”

“If you find yourself angry at someone lower on the economic ladder than you, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’re being manipulated by someone higher on the economic ladder than you.”

“There’s an idea I myself have helped spread, that a vegan is someone who doesn’t like food. That’s wrong. But it is accurate enough, and often enough, to be mildly funny to some people. And, what with new dietary restrictions cropping up every day for any number of reasons, it’s tempting to mock the gluten-intolerant, the diverticular and the Celiac sufferer. Suffering is funny! Comedy is tragedy happening to people you don’t care about. (Emphasis added.)”

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“The whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few rich and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.”

“I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

“We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests – patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds – can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.”

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen.

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.

“On the receiving end, you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.

“And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.

“And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

“That which can be presented without evidence, can be dismissed without consideration. [1]”

“All of the news is fake when corporate media connive with the powerful to produce their desired ends.”

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”