Quote Only Thread

[Gouda]

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

~ Alice Walker

[Simulist]

"The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I've said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective."

— Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence," interview by Jeffrey Elliot

[Allegro]

The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.

[Gouda]

"Gunshots in the middle of a public street in Europe isn't really our style."

~ Israeli security source

(Context: Syrian-Hungarian gunned down in his car on the outskirts of Budapest in the early morning;
later the same day 2 Israeli jets buzz downtown Budapest, catching many off-guard)

[Allegro]

• Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck, and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.

~ Rudolf Arnheim (b 1904) German-born author, art and film theorist, perceptual psychologist. Refer.

[Stephen Morgan]

'Purpose shall be the firmer, heart the keener, courage shall be the more, as our might lessens' -- Battle of Maldon

[Stephen Morgan]

Sometimes it is my notion that there never has been a case of hydrophobia, as anything but an instance of personal witchcraft: but there are so very many data for thinking that a disease in general is very much like an individual case of the disease, in that it runs its course and then disappears -- quite independently of treatment, whether by the poisoned teat of a cow, or the dried sore of a mummy -- that I suspect that once upon a time there was, to some degree, hydrophobia. When I was a boy, pitted faces were [277/278] common. What has become of smallpox? Where are yellow fever and cholera? I'm not supposed to answer my own questions, am I? But serums, say the doctors. But there are enormous areas in the Americas and Europe, where vaccines have never penetrated. But they did it, say the doctors.

Eclipses occur, and savages are frightened. The medicine men wave wands -- the sun is cured -- they did it.

The story of diseases reads like human history -- the rise and fall of Black Death -- and the appearance and rule of Smallpox -- the Tubercular Empire -- and the United Afflictions of Yellow Fever and Cholera. Some of them passed away before serums were thought of, and in times when sanitation was unpopular. Several hundred years ago there was a lepers' house in every good-sized city in England. A hundred years ago there had not been much of what is called improvement in medicine and sanitation, but leprosy had virtually disappeared, in England. Possibly the origin of leprosy in England was in personal witchcraft -- or that if the Bible had never devastated England, nobody there would have had the idea of leprosy -- that when wicked doubts arose, the nasty suspicions of people made them clean.(7)
-- Charles Fort

[jingofever]

"One pass, two mows."

[jam.fuse]

"The scion of a well-known banking family once told me a family secret. When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation from a plentiful larder and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster, much faster than what it eats can be replaced. That is why by its nature money is worth always less. People want money to buy what the machine eats to shit money out. The more the machine eats the less remains. So your money buys always less. This process is now escalating geometrically. If the West does not start a nuclear war first their monetary system will fall apart through the inexorable consumption by the machine of life art flavor beauty to make more and more shit which buys less and less life art flavor beauty because there is less and less to buy. The machine is eating it all. The time must come when money will buy nothing because there will be nothing left for money to buy. Money will eliminate itself."

-- William Seward Burroughs, 1969

[AmyRose]

"Just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer."
-Aldo Leopold

"Family, along with freedom, is everything to these horses...Captivity deadens their spirit. They become mere shells of their former selves...The horses are warehoused as if their lives have no meaning..."
-Craig Downer, wild horse advocate

[jam.fuse]

"At the present time we all are confined in concentration camps called nations. We are forced to obey laws to which we have not consented, and to pay exorbitant taxes to maintain the prisons in which we are confined. The pretext that there is any measure of consent involved or benefits received is wearing very thin indeed. The American people did not even know the atom bomb existed. Still less were they consulted as to whether or not it should be used. Thus, one of the most disastrous decisions in human history was made by incompetent, ill-informed, and ill-intentioned men."

"America is not so [much] a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by non-dreamers.

Space is dream. Space is illusion. To travel in space you must learn to leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, priest talk, mother talk, family talk, love talk, party talk, and country talk. You must learn to exist with no religion no country no allies. You must learn to see what is in front of you with no preconceptions."

-- William Seward Burroughs, 1969

[jam.fuse]

“The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.”

-- Arundhati Roy

[Allegro]

~

• Rulers who want to unleash war know very well
  that they must procure or invent a first victim.

~ Elias Canetti (b 1905), Bulgarian novelist, Literature Nobel Prize 1981

• There is no greater gift to an insecure leader
  that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to
  whip up fear and hatred among the population.

~ Paul Rusesabagina (b 1954), Rwandan humanitarian internationally honored for saving civilians during the Rwandan Genocide

[Gouda]

"No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."

~ 2666, Roberto Bolaño. (Femicide in Ciudad Juárez).

[wintler2]

“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left. The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this.

I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court.

Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

Cynthia McKinney quoted by Chris Hedges.