If you're a fellow quote-enjoyer, you'll probably like The Quote Investigator. It's great to see how adages develop through the years, as in the example below: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” ~ unknown, has existed in many forms since the 1700s “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” ~ Alberto Brandolini, Brandolini's Law “A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.’” ~ Laozi “The reduction of art to awards and prizes and gongs is risibly dumb.” ~ Jonathan Meades, The Joy Of Essex, 0:37:26 - 0:37:31 “Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” ~ Thomas Jefferson “In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.” ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” ~ H. L. Mencken “Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?” ~ Robert G. Ingersoll “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” ~ James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” ~ Socrates (469–399 B.C.) “I still think "nonfungible" sounds like it means "cannot be turned into a mushroom".” ~ Michael Kinyon “'I don’t speak', Bijaz said. 'I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.'” ~ Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah “All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.” ~ Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven [I am irreligious, even anti-religious, but if I had to choose my favorite sentence ever written, this explicitly-religious utterance would probably be it. It perfectly encapsualtes the destructive possessiveness of jealousy. That possessiveness is attributed to the Christian God by Thompson, and not negatively, but I took an opposite reading at first blush in the early aughties, and still do. It's a pithy, and perhaps perfect, summation of a basic human emotion. The mere thought of that line can trigger vivid recall of my own past jealousies. I don't think Thompson intended any of this, which makes language all the more wondrous.] “Rain is no respecter of persons; the snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.” ~ E.E. Cummings “The trouble with oaths of the form 'death before dishonor', is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead and the forsworn. It's a survivor's problem, this one.” ~ Lois Bujold “If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.” ~ Jonathan Meades “It’s possible for good people, in perversely designed systems, to casually perpetrate acts of great harm on strangers, sometimes without ever realising it.” ~ Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma “Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that shouldn’t even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.” ~ Sam Harris “Ubi dubium ibi libertas.” Where there is doubt there is freedom. ~ Latin Proverb “Doubt is the origin of wisdom.” ~ Rene Descartes “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.” ~ Mitch Hedberg “I've never been one for "De mortuis nil nisi bonum", preferring Voltaire's recommendation that while we may owe respect to the living, to the dead we owe only the truth.” ~ Derek Lowe, The Business of Scientific Publishing “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.” ~ Enrique Peñalosa “Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.” ~ Mark Twain “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” ~ Mark Twain “SOCRATES: I am wiser than this man; he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing— DARRYL, SOCRATES' FRIEND: fuck him up socrates” ~ leon “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche “I'm not ashamed to dress 'like a woman' because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.” ~Iggy Pop “So tonight, enjoy yourselves, because nothing can take the sting out of the world's economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.” ~ Billy Crystal, hosting the Oscars “Don't join the book burners.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. [but don’t rule out malice]” ~ Robert J. Hanlon, Hanlon’s/Heinlein’s Razor Related phrase, “cock-up before conspiracy” ~ Sir Bernard Ingham, paraphrased “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” ~ George Orwell “Some people cultivate fear like it’s a crop for them to harvest on Election Day.” ~ Hank Green, I Don't Have a Good Title for This Video “Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” ~ Stephen Hawking “To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.” ~ Unknown, often attributed to Emerson “The wall is growing faster than you can climb it. If you fall off you can’t start over again. There is nothing on the other side. But if you happen to enjoy climbing...” ~ areyouinahole “I pretended to love you until I did. It was seamless.” ~ areyouinahole “Today’s Francophobia is so paltry. At least that of the mid-19th Century bequeathed us a magnificent legacy of marvelous monuments which may have been perfectly useless in their day but which are now a perpetual delight, and a reminder of the wisdom and predictive acumen of great men of state.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Portsmouth Dockyards, 57:44 “When Peter Thiel and other eminently guillotinable plutocrats are trying to keep their money from being recouped by the tax man, they are the defenders and the attackers are the tax authorities who are trying to find one error they’ve made in their secrecy protocol, one error they’ve made in the way that they reason about the law, [...].” ~ emphasis mine, Cory Doctorow, The MMT Podcast #170: Cory Doctorow: Shakedowns, Shell Games & Other Silicon Valley Shenanigans, 5:47 “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” ~ Samuel Beckett “The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again, but less and less and less.” ~ Piet Hein, The Road to Wisdom “Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.” ~ Piet Hein, Consolation, a musing on not resisting the Nazis during their WWII occupation of Denmark “O something pernicious and dread! Something far away from a puny and pious life! Something unproved! something in a trance! Something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.” ~ Walt Whitman, A SONG OF JOYS “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ~ John Steinbeck “Death smells like birthday cake.” ~ Maggie Stiefvater, Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie “Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack.” ~ John Carmack “I’m sorry, the crest made me do it! Its power for good is overpowering my own inherent desire to evil-do; the evil-do that I do do.” ~ X the Eliminator from Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, episode X Gets the Crest “For the past few years, the correct answer to many technical legal questions about the structuring of multibillion-dollar distressed debt deals would have begun with “David R. Jones in Houston has a secret girlfriend at Jackson Walker.” The law is weird.” - Matt Levine, Money Stuff: Of Course Sculptor Got Sued, Oct. 18, 2023 “Some stories don’t have a moral. They’re just sad and disgusting from beginning to end.” ~ Sam O'Nella “There are those depraved few for whom the means do not require an end.” ~ The Major in Hellsing (paraphrase) “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.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson “You seem to have lost your manners as well as your talent. For shame. You used to be such civilized company.” ~ Henry Reedburn “To get level with a snake, you have to crawl on the ground.” ~ Ralph Walton ~ Agatha Christie’s Poirot, S1E9, The King of Clubs, 6:45-7:32 “Only connect.” ~ E.M. Forster (link points to a long fascinating review of a biography of Forster) “You are not obliged to complete the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you free to desist from it...” ~ Rabbi Tarfon “It is the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.” ~ John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy “​It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.” ~ Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” ~ unknown, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, Tom Waits “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!” ~ unknown “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.” ~ H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon “Temet nosce.” ~ Know thyself, Latin phrase “Deserts incite a different superstition or fantasy. A fantasy of monotheism; or at least that's how it seems. The three Abrahamistic monotheistic cults: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all emerged from the same middle-eastern deserts and all believe in the same God. The fun and games down the years has, preposterously, been about which particular prophet owns the exclusive rights to the God franchise.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Magnetic North, Episode 2 “faith-based belligerence initiatives” ~ Jonathan Meades, Magnetic North, Episode 2 “Science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.” ~ Terry Pratchett “Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future.” ~ Richard Corliss “... a bespoke cast of gladiatorial yob-gods—wag-roasting Croesus kids—who, once a week, descend from their Parnassian blingsteads to run around for ninety golden minutes of bravura vanity.” ~ Jonathan Meades on Premier League footballers Of Teddy & Alice Roosevelt: She [Alice] was 17 when she first went to live in the White House in 1901, and they called her Princess Alice, and she, as she later recalled, "looked upon the world as my oyster." When a visiting notable whose dignity had been offended by Princess Alice's sprightly interruptions asked her father whether he could not control his daughter, Theodore Roosevelt gave him a stern answer. "I can do one of two things," he said. "I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” ~ Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics “The great Gothic cathedrals were expressions of structural ingenuity, certainly, but they were also God’s space on Earth; temporal analogues of paradise; trailers for the forthcoming attraction called heaven. Fear of God was the stick; his sumptuous palaces were the carrot. The immensity of a nave, easily the biggest enclosed space a person would see in an entire medieval life, was an instrument of propaganda through scale. It dwarfs humans, renders them tiny in the scheme of things. It was a brutally literal means of proclaiming God’s might.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Get High, 22:00 “There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein [not a huge Heinlein fan, as it were, but he had some alright takes] “It's like Garth Marenghi meets, um, The Bionic Man.” ~ Mark Kermode describing x_film, 11 May 2017 podcast w/Katherine Waterston “It’s written like a translation from Chinese to English, but it’s just someone from New Jersey.” ~ Mike Stoklasa, describing the blurb on the Black Cougar DVD.  “In the works of great writers we find our own neglected thoughts.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson “When France sneezes, Europe catches cold.” ~ Klemens von Metternich, also said of America and the rest of the world in modern times “He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.” ~ Douglas Adams “Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.” ~ Jack Handey “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” ~ Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” ~ Omar Khayyám, supposedly, via Edward FitzGerald “Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.” ~ Thomas Henry Huxley “frustnesia” portmanteau, frustration + amnesia, HMSGoose on BoingBoing forums “To crush your old PCs, to see them driven to format, and to hear the installation of their Linux.” ~ Quernan in response to “what is best in life?” “Is it moral to believe that our sins—yours and mine—can be forgiven by the punishment of another person? Is it ethical to believe that?” ~ Christopher Hitchens “The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn't he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured?” ~ Richard Dawkins “As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” ~ Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights" in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri “We seem much more comfortable with propagating...values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky aand Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.” ~ Neal Stephenson “Movements born in hatred very quickly take on the characteristics of the thing they oppose.” ~ J. S. Habgood, Archbishop of York, 1986 “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into.” ~ Jonathan Swift [bullshit, this; 2 much better related quotes below] “It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” ~ Mark Twain “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” ~ Upton Sinclair “If you have nothing to hide, you have no sense of shame and are probably a monster.” ~ Morgan Marquis-Boire “The defining sentiment of our age is the fear of looking stupid.” ~ Duarte Guerreiro, 2011, comment on David Foster Wallace review “Sometimes I think I am surrounded by insects masquerading as men for some diabolical reason.” - Henry Miller “Big fleas have little fleas, Upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.” ~ Augustus De Morgan, The Siphonaptera “Here dead we lie Because we did not choose To live and shame the land From which we sprung. - Life, to be sure, Is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, And we were young.” ~ A. E. Housman, Here Dead We Lie “The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” ~ H.L. Mencken “This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate.)” ~ Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures “I cannot help but notice that there is no problem between us that cannot be solved by your departure.” ~ Mark Twain “The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein “One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority... It is an indispensable thing. People can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed— some divine work—well, I don't accept the premise.” ~ Christopher Hitchens “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.” ~ George Orwell, 1984 “You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will deconstruct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'” ~ Gabe Newell on the Nerdist Pocast German reporter to Art Spiegelman, 1987: “Don’t you think that a comic book about the Holocaust is in bad taste?” Art Spiegelman: “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.” [absolutely btfo, lmao] “We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.” ~ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” ~ Henry Ford [ironic given how many people hold up the Henry Fords of the worlds as auteur genius Great Men of History] “There have always been cities like this in our world, the kind that inspire men like Samuel Johnson to proclaim: “…when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” I’d modify that to say that “when a man’s bank account becomes tired, London quickly tires of him; for there is in London far more than some lives can afford.” That’s one reason why crime is an inevitability in these warrens, whether real or fictional, because the availability of so much that is conducive to living a good life (any and every sort of good) causes people to feel the lack of what they do not have more sharply than ever.” ~ Adam Smith at RPS, Of Crime And The City In Thief, Dickens And GTA “His fingers are bloated maggots. He leers through cockroach whiskers. He thinks with his bones, he feels with his brow, he tries to remember his human form.” ~ Osip Mandelstam on Joseph Stalin, translated/assembled by Jonathan Meades (I presume) for Joe Building, 1:04:48 “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” ~ Lord Henry to Basil in The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde “And therewith began a fearful battle betwixt worm and man.” ~ William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason “In every cry of every man In every infant’s cry of fear In every voice, in every ban The mind-forged manacles I hear” ~ William Blake, London “You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen.” ~Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy “Men think epilepsy divine merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.” ~ Hippocrates, 400 BC “God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak -- and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful -- which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?” ~ Epicurus, from The Epicurus Reader, translated by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson “Every day drips down my cheek then splashes onto the floor.” ~ Haiku (senryu) by Marcus J Ranum (with associated photo; naked lady warning) “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.” ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Addendum by Bruce Sterling: “Well, if you amend that to ‘clutching the Old Testament and consulting the Koch Brothers,’ it's pretty spot-on, Carl.” “Denn die todten reiten schnell.” in English: Because the dead travel fast. Bram Stoker, Dracula (said of Dracula by a person nearby) “Though they've been here for eighty years, Grangemouth's refineries and petrochemical plants represent an economic future that might—just might—see Scotland become the third richest country in Europe. More than that, they also represent a mercurial optimism that is somehow both moral and aesthetic. The sheer drama and pyrotechnic bravura and fiery magnificence is heartlifing; it makes the spirit soar. Humans require something on a scale far beyond them; neovernacular domestic hutches are as much a depressant as alcohol. A site like this is a manifestation of the possible. It shows what Scotland is capable of. It isn't meek. Big industry—visible industry—is much more than a socioeconomic necessity. It's much more than just—just—jobs. It's material. It promotes a sense of identity. It's a symbol of pride. When we carelessly rationally allow it to be disappeared, we're destroying much more than the hopes of lives that are yet to be lived.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Off Kilter, Episode 3 “‘I know that faraway look which men get when they're peeing,’ Orson explains with absolute authority. ‘If you ever watched them in the old days, when the pissoirs gave you an opportunity to watch play of expression as you walked down the street: it’s a sort of terrible dreamy expresion that comes over men’s faces when they’re peeing.’ He pauses, apparently giving me time to search my memory for a familiar male face covered with the tell-tale dreamy expression. ‘And when you see that in a pool, you know, it’s most unnerving,’ Orson continues.” Orson Welles, A Biography “... pumpkin spice latte—the coffee that tastes like a candle. And I don’t mean it tastes like a candle smells; pumpkin spice latte tastes like a candle tastes.” ~ John Oliver “And their defense is always, “But evolution is only a theory!” Which is true. I mean, it is a theory. And it’s good, you know, that they say that. Because it gives you hope that then maybe they feel the same way about the theory of gravity and they might just float the fuck away.” ~ Tim Minchin “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith...” ~ Adolf Hitler after signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat “We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” ~ Gene Roddenberry “If I had a nickel for every time you got on my nerves, I would have a sock full of nickels to beat you with.” ~ unknown “And even if buildings have no beneficial behavioral effects, it is surely preferable that they are made with passionate intelligence, craft, and an eye for beauty rather than with clumsy illiteracy and a fawning accessibility. Accessibility means nothing more than being comprehensible to morons.” ~ Jonathan Meades, The Joy of Essex, 0:19:48 “Replacing hell on earth with heaven on earth meant folk music, folk song, folk dance, folk craft, folk weaving, folk building, folk bunting, folk banners, folk folking.” ~ Jonathan Meades, The Joy of Essex, 0:46:28 “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” ~ John Lennon “Anti-urbanism is at best crankish, at worst a springboard to horror. Like all reactionary hot air—back to basics, traditional values, that sort of tosh—it should be fit only to be mocked.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Jerry Building, 0:8:50 “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson “Our language… you might say our language lacks a word. We have the word ‘impossible’, but we need to differentiate between two sorts of things. The impossible is that which, by definition, can never be done. We need another word: unpossible, that which can’t be done just yet.” ~ John W. Campbell “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.” ~ Robin Williams as Lance Clayton in World’s Greatest Dad “I support legalization of all drugs but only because I want to see the advertising.” ~ @JohnFugelsang on Twitter “There are few places with such an intense concentration of good though not outstanding secular buildings whose sum is more than its parts. Satisfying townscape is not achieved by wall-to-wall tour de force. Indeed, when I worked in central Rome, I felt sated by the unyielding diet of masterpieces and rather yearned for streetscape infected by ordinariness. The sacred buildings here are different; they are tour de force. Within a few hundred yards of each other are three churches of the highest order; the devil got the best tunes, god got the best buildings.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Off-Kilter, Episode One, on Aberdeen’s Cathedrals “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time “I just hate health food.” ~ Julia Child “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” ~ Tom Waits, Step Right Up, Small Change (1976) “A pagan wrote this and yet it has justice, truth and mercy. I can hardly restrain myself from saying, Holy/Saint Socrates, pray for me.” ~ Erasmus on Socrates’ Nicomachean Ethics “This kind of contemplative nonsense—turn off the mind and you’ll have bliss—has ghastly consequences. The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. That’s Buddhism: the resort that everyone goes to when they've exhausted monotheism.” ~ Christopher Hitchens [strongly disagree with this, but some hints of truth] “Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.” ~ Christopher Hitchens “If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings, I say, ‘I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.’ In this country, I’ve been told, ‘That’s offensive,’ as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment. Not to me they don’t. And I’m not running for anything, so I don’t have to pretend to like people when I don’t.” ~ Christopher Hitchens “... unmitigated woo-type bullshittery…” ~ Elusus @ BoingBoing “... I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” - Anais Nin “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr. “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” ~ Cardinal Richelieu (disputed) “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” ~ Steven Weinberg “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche “God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.” ~ Edward Abbey “My wife: ‘Describe me in one word. I'm curious.’ Me: ‘Curious?’” ~ Ralph Henry “You can give her nothing. If it’s not nothing, then don’t give it to her.” ~ my Mom to one of my neices who'd asked to feed the other “If less is more then nothing is everything.” ~ adage “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” ~ G. K. Chesterton “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” ~ Harry S. Truman “[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.” ~ Joseph Heller, Catch-22 “9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to rape someone, blow the whistle until someone comes to stop you.” [from a darkly-humorous list of rape prevention tips riffing on how such tips often seem to victim-blame] ~ Can You Relate “The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.” ~ Jean Cocteau “There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.” ~ English Proverb “Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.” ~ George Bernard Shaw “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.” ~ Fred Allen “If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation and our children's futures, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.” ~ B. Lester “Why do communists only drink herbal tea? Because proper tea is theft.” ~ Unknown [fun groaner] “She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” ~ J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” ~ Ernest Hemingway “Always on DRM is like buying a book but only being able to read it if you call the publisher first and leave that connection open while you're reading. If the publisher is busy, too bad for you. If the publisher is closed for the weekend, too bad for you. If the publisher changes their phone number and you don't have the new number, too bad for you.” ~ markdotnet @ Boing Boing “But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo while passing on the opportunity to participate in Million Dollar Baby, Ray, The Aviator, Sideways and Finding Neverland. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.” ~ Roger Ebert reviewing Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo “That reminds me of a joke headline I saw recently: ‘Synaesthetic eats Skittles, smells the rainbow.’” ~ Christopher @ Boing Boing “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” ~ Excerpt from How (and Why) I Became an Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Christopher Hitchens' book The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever “The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.” H.L. Mencken “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” ~ H.L. Mencken “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.” ~ Mark Twain “He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which." ~ Douglas Adams http://theoatmeal.com/blog/quotations “My father and grandfather used to run a microbrewery for potato pop on their premises, which they sold for thirty cents per jar. This practice was stopped by armed police, who arrived with a warrant granted on the basis of the beverage causing blindness in the local population.” LionsPhill @Rock, Paper, Shotgun translating Potatoman Seeks the Troof (more greatness at link) “I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?” ~ Chris Kluwe to Maryland delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. “My favorite professor in undergrad, who taught in the Religion department used to tell a story about leading a trip of students to Russia. They stayed in a Russian Orthodox convent during their visit. The Mother Superior met with the students and told them about their history, traditions, and theology. One student, who came from an evangelical background, had trouble understanding Orthodox theology (which is much more focused on the relationship of Christ to the Church--the whole body of believers), and finally asked, 'Ok, but do you accept Jesus as your personal Savior?' The Mother Superior paused for a minute, not sure she understood the question. 'Personal?' she asked. 'You mean like a toothbrush?'” ~ Alan Smithee @ Straight Dope “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn't place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.” ~ Jamie Raskin “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” ~ Frank Herbert “There are no monoglot Gaelic speakers. Thus huge sums are frittered away on life support for a language which is a luxury, not a means of communication, but a symbol of tribal belonging. You have only to go back a mere seven centuries to a time when Galeic was spoken in Lothian and the borders. Authenticity will link you to the distant past of your ancestors. That idyll of freezing mud, untreated animal furs, plague, and woad. ~ Jonathan Meads, On Jargon, 33:47 “If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... The secular people, we have no country. We the people—all the secular people who are looking for freedom—we have to keep together. We are international, as they—the fanatics of all religions—are international.” ~ Marjane Satrapi “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ~ Arthuer Shopenhauer “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~ Charles Darwin “Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” ~ Howard Zinn “Ma droite est enfoncée, ma gauche cède - tout va bien - j'attaque” — "”My right has been pushed back, my left is giving way - Excellent - Now I attack!” or: “Hard pressed on my right; my left is in retreat. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking. Attaquez!” ~ General Ferdinand Foch to General Joffre during Battle of the Marne “I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Now, you can think of an uncountable number of questions that run the other way, where we once had a religious answer and now the authority of religion has been battered and nullified by science, and by moral progress, and by secular progress generally. And I think that’s not an accident.” ~ Sam Harris “Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson “We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that.” ~ Sam Halpern, Shit My Dad Says “No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, As well as if a promontory were: As well as if a manor of thy friend's Or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne, No Man Is an Island “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” ~ Aaron Swartz “Q: What would be hardest to explain about contemporary life to someone visiting from, say, 1950? A: I carry a device in my pocket that gives me access to pretty much the sum of human knowledge... I use it to look at pictures of cats and argue with strangers.” ~ Jake0748 “Path Of Exile sounds like something you’d find on a demon’s GPS. ‘Go straight for 666m, turn right at Pentagram Lane. You have reached your destination, have a horrible existence.’” ~ Craig Pearson, RPS “Right, because the [Glenn] Beck set comes up with so many "products and ideas". Maybe they'll figure out a way to grow an extra nipple and squeeze their fear and paranoia through it as some sort of drinkable (albeit likely somewhat sour) milk.” ~ blendergasket “Faith without doubt leads to moral arrogance, the eternal pratfall of the religiously convinced.” ~ Joe Klein “An intoxicated Jagger phoned Watts' hotel room in the middle of the night asking "Where's my drummer?". Watts reportedly got up, shaved, dressed in a suit, put on a tie and freshly shined shoes, descended the stairs, and punched Jagger in the face, saying: "Don't ever call me your drummer again. You're my fucking singer!"” ~ Life by Keith Richards “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” ~ Isaac Asimov “People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.” ~ Prof. Jason Read “Try saying this when your caller ID shows an unknown caller: ‘Hello. Westwood Sperm Bank. You spank it, we bank it.’” ~ Ralph Henry “I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.” ~ Richard Feynman “Given enough time, hydrogen starts to wonder where it came from, and where it is going.” ~ BeeKeeperReno “You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while” ~ Eckhart Tolle “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” ~ George Carlin “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” ~ Winston Churchill to Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943, inspired the naming of Operation Bodyguard “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” ~ Mao Zedong “Those who would have you see the infinite as a coin with but two faces are not your friends.” ~ Mike Carey writing Duma, the Angel of Silence, in Lucifer, Issue #15, Page 22. “He's a lounge-singing native American grifter with acid for blood. She's a disco-crazy cat-loving college professor with the power to see death. They fight crime!” ~ They fight crime! “hurf me no blurfs” ~ Malcanis (fellow EVE Online player) “Given the gaps in science, and given the elasticity of religious thinking, it will always be possible to reconcile the most gratuitous nonsense with our modern scientific worldview. This is not the same thing as having scientific reasons to believe in God.” ~ Sam Harris “The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.” ~ Huang Po “But I think there’s another reason so many believers reflexively frame atheism as bitter and nihilistic. It’s because they have to. It’s because accepting the existence of good, happy atheists undercuts so many of the rationalizations for their beliefs.” ~ Greta Christina “If I had a nickel for every Christian who called other Christians “not real Christians,” I’d have about 2.1 billion nickels.” ~ Odin Zeus McGaffer “Gods are children’s blankets that get carried over into adulthood.” ~ James Randi “My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.” ~ Frank Zappa “I think the trouble with being a critical thinker or an atheist, or a humanist is that you’re right. And it’s quite hard being right in the face of people who are wrong without sounding like a fuckwit. People go, “do you think the vast majority of the world is wrong”, well yes. I don’t know how to say that nicely, but yes.” ~ Tim Minchin “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” ~ Albert Einstein “But at least it's patented by a notorious patent troll, which means that other jackasses who try to implement this stupid idea will find themselves tied up in absurd, wasteful lawsuits. It's mutually assured dipshits.” ~ Cory Doctorow “I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.” ~ Jules Renard “... the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” ~ Hermann Göring “Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.” ~ Christopher Hitchens “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” ~ Isaac Asimov “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” ~ Robert Frank, Life (26 November 1951), p. 21 “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” ~ Banksy [hypocritical given his subsequent trademark/copyright lawsuits] “The consistency of ice cream invites numerous comparisons to manure, but that doesn't mean I'm putting shit on a waffle cone.” ~ Anonymous “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.’” ~ Jim Jarmusch “Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind.” ~ Buddha “Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.” ~ Anonymous “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, To gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote: To travel is to live.” ~ Hans Christian Anderson, in 'The Fairy Tale of My Life' “I’m not saying she's fat, I’m just saying if I had to pick five of the fattest people I know, she'd be three of them.” ~ Unknown “The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” ~ George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, Preface (1916) “It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing - atoms with curiosity - that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.” ~ Richard Feynman “I don’t believe in god because I’ve thought about it.” ~ Sean Lock “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” ~ Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong “All your Western theologies, the whole mythologies of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.” ~ Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana Act II “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” ~ Richard Dawkins (2006) The Root of All Evil television programme “I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another.” ~ Lord Byron, letter to Francis Hodgson, 3 September 1811 “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.” ~ André Gide “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung “The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We've always done it this way.’” ~ Grace Hopper “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ~ Ira Glass “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. [...] Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.” ~ John Adams, Letter to John Taylor (15 April 1814) “I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden. The word seems to span a spectrum from simply notinterfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it uniquely well placed for ideological purposes. People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call 'respect creep' sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellow-feeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence. In the limit, unless you let me take over your mind and your life, you are not showing proper respect for my religious or ideological convictions.” ~ Simon Blackburn, Philosophers Without Gods “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.” ~ Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right “If religion is the opiate of the masses, then fundamentalism is the amphetamine.” ~ Miz Vittitow “Why though should we treat [the integrity and character of villages] as a virtue, and seek to preserve, let alone emulate, the bucolic horror; the numbing boredom; the prying intimacy; the enforced mateyness; the illiterate poverty; the silage stench and the bestiality workshops which characterize village life? Real villages are why we live in cities.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Off-Kilter, Episode 1, Aberdeen [26:06] “There is nothing that cannot be used as an ad hoc folly, as a felicity beacon, as an iconically-iconic icon, and there is apparently no-one on the island who is immune to the appeal of the found object and the oxidizing object. Whoever would have thought that the last remaining bastion of fundamentalist Calvinism would become the site of a scrap cult, and that the most seductive collective expression of Gaelic vernacular culture would comprise buses in bushes; crumbling pickups; corrugated iron; more corrugated iron… whoever would have thought?” ~ Jonathan Meades, Off-Kilter, Episode 2, Isle of Rust, 53:20 “It is said that some of the Indian tribes place the heads of their children between pieces of bark until the form of the skull is permanently changed. To us this seems a most shocking custom: and yet, after all, is it as bad as to put the souls of our children in the strait-jacket of a creed? To so utterly deform their minds that they regard the God of the Bible as a being of infinite mercy, and really consider it a virtue to believe a thing just because it seems unreasonable? Every child in the Christian world has uttered its wondering protest against this outrage. All the machinery of the church is constantly employed in corrupting the reason of children. In every possible way they are robbed of their own thoughts and forced to accept the statements of others. Every Sunday school has for its object the crushing out of every germ of individuality. The poor children are taught that nothing can be more acceptable to God than unreasoning obedience and eyeless faith, and that to believe God did an impossible act, is far better than to do a good one yourself. They are told that all religions have been simply the John-the-Baptists of ours; that all the gods of antiquity have withered and shrunken into the Jehovah of the Jews; that all the longings and aspirations of the race are realized in the motto of the Evangelical Alliance. “Liberty in non- essentials;” that all there is, or ever was, of religion can be found in the apostles’ creed; that there is nothing left to be discovered; that all the thinkers are dead, and all the living should simply be believers; that we have only to repeat the epitaph found on the grave of wisdom; that grave-yards are the best possible universities and that the children must be forever beaten with the bones of the fathers.” ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, Individuality “There are as many golf courses in Aberdeen and its immediate surroundings as there are tattooists, and it’s soon to get two more. It needs them! Just as it needs shopping malls and car parks. And it’s not every day that it gets offered a new golf experience by The MacDonald, formerly trading as The Donald, and before that as Donald Trump. That, however, was before he discovered his roots. And in the kingdom of the bald, the man who says his roots are in the Hebrides is king... though Hebrides is a most unusual way to describe one's armpit and groin. His career has been one long flirtation with success; if you suck cess, you get success. He is richer than the richest man in the world, who is MacDonald Trump. He creates his own body weight in wealth every ten seconds. None of his businesses has gone bust owing nine hundred million pounds, so the decision to grant The MacDonald planning permission to build New Trumpton-On-Sea is a farsighted one.” ~ Jonathan Meades on Donald Trump in Off-Kilter, Episode 1: Aberdeen; 50:40 “I don't like ass kissers, flag wavers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: "Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.'" Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, "We're the So-and-Sos," take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it's unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don't participate; it will be your death. And if they tell you you're not a team player, congratulate them on being observant.” ~ George Carlin Asked if his serious illness has affected his view of the afterlife, in a panel discussion including atheist writer Sam Harris, Hitchens replied, “I would say it fractionally increases my contempt for the false consolation of religion and my dislike for the dictatorial and totalitarian part of it. I presume what I say by the first is self-evident. What I mean by the second is: it’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know, but who are unbelievers, and say, ‘Now are you going to change your mind?’ In fact, it’s considered almost a polite question. As you know, there’s a long history of fraud about this. People claim that Darwin had a deathbed recantation, they’ve made up lies about Thomas Paine. It goes on all the time. It’s a very nasty little history. But there’s also a horrible undertone of blackmail to it. People write and say, ‘Look, you’ve got about one chance left now. Aren’t you going to take it? I’m writing to you as a friend.’ They’ve even tried it on me when I’ve been very ill, and didn’t have quite the vinegar I’d like to have had, in a hospital bed. I don’t mind. I can take it. But I think there are a lot of people older than myself, iller than myself and, perhaps, at the risk of seeming conceited, less educated than myself, to whom that’s a horrible experience. It’s very depressing and alarming to be spoken to in that way. I mean, if Sam [Harris] and I were to form a corps of people to go around religious hospitals—which is what happens in reverse—and say to people who are lying in pain, ‘Did you say you were Catholic?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, look, you may only have a few days left, but you don’t have to live them as a serf, you know. Just recognize that that was all bullshit, that the priests have been cheating you, and I guarantee you you’ll feel better.’ I don’t think that would be very ethical. I think it would be something of a breach of taste. But if it’s in the name of God, it has a social license. Well fuck that, is what I say… and will say, if it’s my last breath.” ~ Christopher Hitchens | http://youtu.be/uFCqt-95ct8 “Wilted flowers; yews; black granite headstones; green EnviroGlass chips recycled from bottle-bank arisings at one Pound seventy per kilo; empathy angels; burghers’ mausolea fit to burst like tins of fermenting herrings; mournful cypresses. A city may lack these precise features, but a city—any city, the Granite City—is a sprawling cemetery taken over by humans rather than by feral cats, rats and bats. We are mere squatters, at best stewards, of streets and buildings that have become unwitting tombs, that time has changed into accidental monuments to forgotten lives. Lives which no matter how physically close we are to where they were led, and where they ended, are hidden. We can touch the same stones they touched. We shiver like they did at quarter irons grinding on cobbles, but we cannot know them, no matter how thorough our investigations, no matter how strenuous our imaginations. Cobbles are actually mute. Stones can’t speak. It is pathetically fallacious to believe that they can. Stones and bricks and girders and breezeblocks are inanimate. Chunks of quarried mineral are mute; they have nothing to say. But they were disposed by our forebears in a particular order, in particular combinations, for particular purposes. They didn’t get there by chance. So they could be said to tell a story of a sort, but it’s not linear and it’s forever fluctuating. The city is an eternal jigsaw puzzle who successive generations of designers don’t know the shape of; they don’t know what it represents. What we squat in are the most tangible vestiges of distant cultures in cities layered like a geological pizzata. If they are alien to us it is because they come from far away, far away in time rather than space, from a place which precludes migration, where souls rest in nothingness. We do not today commonly trade as fletchers, cairds, cranters, challeners, lardeners, catchpoles, haywards, higglers, mathers, though some of us bear the names of those who did. We do not travel in brougham or landaus; we do not dress in crinolines or untreated pelts like berserkers, and what a blouse I’d look in either. We speak a language different to that of Harry Lauder, let alone that of the Scottish play, let alone that of old Macbeth himself. We don’t dance polkas or minuets. We don’t impose the death penalty. The last man to be hanged in Scotland, for a crime passionnel in Jackson Terrace as it happens, was executed here at Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen on August the fifteenth, 1963. Our food, our diseases, our gadgets, our license, our manners: all these would bemuse a revenant from merely fifty years ago. That hanged man would be foxed by what he has missed. Yet, were his great great great-grandparents also to pop their spectral heads ‘round the portal of the ages and peer into the present, they would have no difficulty whatsoever in recognizing much of the built fabric of the cities where they lived then and where we live now. The spires, the dormers, the pediments, the railings, the doorsteps, would all be utterly familiar. We are apparently culturally programmed to bemoan the loss of buildings that disappeared before we were born, and we rue those that vanish before our eyes. In our dubious grief and hand-wringing and fretting about what no longer exists, we lazily overlook what does exist, what has survived. We overlook the wonderful gift of the ordinary, because there’s so much of it. If we live on a beach, we take sand for granted, if we live near a hospital we take seeping bags of operation waste for granted.” ~ Jonathan Meades, Off-Kilter, Episode 1: Aberdeen “One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one's advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without its knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person's left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up, he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” — rather than “I don't really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You've been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don't know exactly what you asked me to do.” Similarly, if the patient's left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed. The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander inchief. Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that “humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naïve self-love”: the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions. He was right about the cumulative impact, but it was cognitive neuroscience rather than psychoanalysis that conclusively delivered the third blow.” ~ Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002

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