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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 31a330f | Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data. The USDA removed the inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse by the government. The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane M.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 140529c | The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. --Sun-tzu | Michael Lewis | ||
| f1afc5a | The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it "quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 55659f2 | That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel's most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 5441e68 | Come on, give me a shimmy!" Ruby screeched from the couch as she ground out one cigarette and then lit another. "You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy! Now, goddamnit, show me your war shimmy!" | Laurie Notaro | ||
| af56b4c | Okay, okay,' I said to my husband as he picked up a food dehydrator off the table and shot me a look. 'Maybe I did get carried away. Maybe the world won't end in a year, maybe it won't end until 2028, when the Aztec calendar stops.' 'The Bugles will be very old by then,' my husband said. 'They will have lost their snappy crunch.' 'They weren't to eat,' I said. 'They were to put on our fingers and poke the eyes out of looters. | Laurie Notaro | ||
| b29b05a | Every city began as a campsite - pg. 25 | Chris Ware | ||
| 2a45e50 | And where is home? Is it where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where life puts us to make good use of our gifts? | Mark Nepo | ||
| d9b161e | The Pain of Becoming For the flower, it is fully open at each step of its blossoming. We do ourselves a great disservice by judging where we are in comparison to some final destination. This is one of the pains of aspiring to become something: the stage of development we are in is always seen against the imagined landscape of what we are striving for. So where we are--though closer all the time--is never quite enough. | Mark Nepo | ||
| dea7a61 | integrity is an unending process of letting our inner experience and our outer experience complete each other, in spite of our very human lapses. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 5f3e71a | Stranger still is how the very core issues we avoid return, sometimes with different faces, but still, we are brought full circle to them, again and again. Regardless of how we may try to skip over or sidestep what we need to face, we humbly discover that no other threshold is possible until we use our courage to open the door before us. Perhaps the oldest working truth of self-discovery is that the only way out is through. That we are retu.. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 3fca56f | What it really comes down to is the clearness of heart to stop defining who I am by those who have hurt me and to take up the risk to love myself, to validate my own existence, pain and all, from the center out. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 7784aa5 | Patience devastates us with the truth that, in essence, when we fear another, we fear ourselves; when we distrust another, we distrust ourselves; when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves; when we kill another, we kill ourselves. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 5bb7371 | A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as .. | language politics populism surveillance | Christopher Hitchens | |
| e4e4a65 | You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? | Joseph Heller | ||
| a8cbbac | Yossarian was in love with the maid in the lime-colored panties because she seemed to be the only woman left he could make love to without falling in love with. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 047207a | There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. | Joseph Heller | ||
| b8ec05d | The important thing is to keep them pledging,' he explained to his cohorts. 'It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what "pledge" and "allegiance" mean.' To Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a glorious pain in the ass, since it complicated their task of organizing the crews for each combat mission. Men were tied up all ov.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 23595a9 | I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0cfa7f7 | There was something, both in fiction and in his life (Nabokov), that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I could invent violin or be devoured by the void. | azar nafisi | ||
| 868d7d5 | One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b29ac11 | We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ee9dd7e | Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0b89440 | hy ft@ mshtt ldhhn Gfl@ 'l ykfy nh lm ttzwj b`d | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 8c0f9f3 | All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 1c2e73c | So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit. | happy-endings | Azar Nafisi | |
| 936a318 | w lknn fy dhlk lwqt lm nkn qd w`yn b`du l~ 'y md~ kn nkhwnu 'Hlmn. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| cc8113b | She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ef07994 | It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| c766f94 | Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. "A native of America who cannot read or write," said John Adams, "is as rare an appearance . . . as a Comet or an Earthquake." | reading | Azar Nafisi | |
| 31b3ca0 | Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| d80348b | jb! kyf ymkn llHZ@ nftH ytym@ 'n ttHwl l~ Hry@ hy'l@? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b230e25 | Our patents' old age shocks us in the same manner that our children's growth to maturity does , but without the joy. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 3f46b92 | One of the most wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one .. | diversity opposition plurality tensions tolerance | Azar Nafisi | |
| 912935b | Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and c.. | Neil Postman | ||
| fb6743d | Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment." | discourse embarrassing entertainment fragment news news-of-the-day presentation technology television | Neil Postman | |
| 48d34db | To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, w.. | deduction inference reading | Neil Postman | |
| ce6e507 | We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television | Neil Postman | ||
| 2c19fcd | It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions | Neil Postman | ||
| a792988 | In saying no one knew about the ideas implicit in the telegraph, I am not quite accurate. Thoreau knew. Or so one may surmise. It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Maine could instantly send a message to a man in Texas, Thoreau asked, "But what do they have to say to each other?" In asking this question, to which no serious interest was paid, Thoreau was directing attention to the psychological and social m.. | media social-science society telegraph television | Neil Postman | |
| 7384370 | Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tole.. | exposition logic reading reason typography | Neil Postman | |
| 288cecc | We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis--a theory, a vision, a metaphor-- | Neil Postman | ||
| d4ea7a7 | The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas. | Neil Postman | ||
| efa110c | How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? | Neil Postman |