Quote Only Thread

[Laodicean]

...they preach this Gospel of trickling down economics and Capitalism. It's not trickling down! It's pissing on everybody!
They don't care!

- Immortal Technique @ Occupy Wall St.

[jam.fuse]

GQ interviewer: How would you describe your fashion?

Steve Albini: I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function.

[jam.fuse]

Kurt Kurt Kurt in the dirt dirt dirt

-- Nicole Williamson

[vanlose kid]

*

A man of strong principles [Marcelo Bielsa, former coach of the Chilean national futbol team, now coach of the provisional basque national team Athletic Bilbao], who as a boy was arrested by police after he told them to move because they stood in his way as he went to take a corner in a game of football in street and who, once let off, then refused to leave the police station until they gave his ball back; a man who responded to people looting TVs following the Chilean earthquake by responding: "I don't know if that [looting TVs] is crime; what I do know is that it is a crime to tell people that they are idiots if they don't have a plasma TV and then tell them they can pay for it in one hundred instalments."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog ... ao-la-liga

*

[Allegro]

Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.[Wikipedia][Wikiquote]

POST 1415

[Allegro]

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. [Refer.]

Masculine third-person singular pronouns apply equally to female persons in the above, if you wish.

[Simulist]

The mind craves for formulations and definitions, always eager to squeeze reality into a verbal shape - Nisargadatta

[Elihu]

"We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles."
– Frederic Bastiat

"The unreal has about as much influence on them (crowds) as the real."
– Gustave Le Bon

[Laodicean]

The state and its police were not neutral referees. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it, and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new President, or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

...

To omit or to minimize...voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women — once they organize and protest and create movements — have a voice no government can suppress.

- Howard Zinn

[Elihu]

Indeed, the stress placed by Federalists on national defense and a vigorous commercial policy often seemed to mask a radical shift in direction from the protection of individual liberty to the pursuit of national riches and glory. When the Anti-Federalists saw the new Constitution defended as having the "noble purposes" to make us "respectable as a nation abroad, and rich as individuals at home" and as calculated to promote "the grandueur and importance of America, until time shall be no more," they feared for the principles of the American governments - H Storing.

"You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased," Patrick Henry warned, "nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your Government."

[Laodicean]

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

- Emma Goldman

[Elihu]

Daniel Webster quotes:
No power but Congress can declare war, but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war?
Daniel Webster quotes:
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what they may.
Daniel Webster quotes:
Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.
Daniel Webster quotes:
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.

[Gouda]

“I worry every day how I will keep a roof over my head in the future. My teeth are all broken and I cannot afford to get them fixed because all my $$ is going to Aetna. So actually you could say that I am neglecting my health in order to be able to pay for my insurance.”

--Unemployed 61-year-old woman, in a letter to NY State's Insurance Department informing them that Aetna wanted to raise her $1,932 monthly premium as much as 19.7 percent.

In Seeking Rate Increases in New York, Health Insurers Fight to Keep Secrets

[Bruce Dazzling]

A friend just said this in a Facebook chat:

We have to let go of what we think we deserve, because it was never a good thing to begin with, and it was always at the expense of the rest of the planet.

[Simulist]

In a sense, we are in the same ethical and moral dilemma as the physicists in the days prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for a nearly total control of human emotional status.

- Dr. Wayne Evans
U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine, 1978