Quotes

quotes.txt

“I’ve just got to say one thing: If this is it, if this is really the end—I get to use a rocket launcher.”
—Winston, Human Target (2010) S02E07

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“Behind the velvet lies / There is a truth as hard as steel.”
—“Holy Diver” by Dio

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My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be.
—from “Conversations with Muad’Dib” by the princess Irulan
—Frank Herbert’s /Dune/ (epigraph from chapter)

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“I’ve baked haggis more lethal than you.”
—The Scotsman’s Wife (from /Samurai Jack/)

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“Only in the internet age can searching for obscure political speech be more embarrassing than searching for midget gangbangs.”
—SmokeyDBear
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cdl27/so_i_was_searching_for_porn_and_i_found_this/c0rtqjs

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“People always try’n to fuck other people’s lives up by telling lies — you wanna really fuck someone’s life up? Tell the truth: their life’ol never be the same.”
—Jason Stackhouse
/True Blood/ S03E01 @~25:00

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Sam: “You’re fucked up, Mister. But you’re cool.”
Shadow: “I believe that’s what they call the human condition[.]”
—Neil Gaiman, /American Gods/, chapter 7

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“Aw… you’re so cute, I could just maul you to death.”
—Jake the Magic Dog, /Adventure Time with Finn & Jake/

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“If there’s one thing bears can do, it’s persevere.”
—Stephen Fry, /Stephen Fry in America/ Episode 2, “The Deep South”

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[12:41pm] maxp: please, however, do not use c99shell or r57 or anything of that sort
[12:41pm] dfisher: I’ll use original bourne
[12:42pm] dfisher: because using it is obviously superior in every way
[12:42pm] dfisher: and making it again was just a waste of time
[12:42pm] dfisher: because it was perfect
[12:42pm] dfisher: for some value of ‘perfect’
[12:42pm] maxp: haha, I was referring to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTi0epK6gtU
[12:43pm] maxp: script kiddie tool
[12:43pm] harvimt: isn’t that a little redundant?
[12:44pm] harvimt: aren’t all script kiddies tools?
[12:44pm] maxp: haha
[12:45pm] dfisher: touché
#psudrupal@irc.cat.pdx.edu

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Since Sally considered herself to be a capitalist, this wasn’t likely to appeal to her. She knew very little about socialism.
Plainly the economic relations between people weren’t perfect, but there was little that agitation and propaganda and cheap journalism—she gathered that this Goldberg was some kind of journalist—could do to make them better.
—Thought Sally Lockhart
/Tiger in the Well/ by Phillip Pullman, Chapter 4 - The Tax Collectors (p. 44)

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“This is okay; this is just a moment that will haunt me forever.”
—Mark, /Peep Show/ S02e04 (at the very end)

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“‘Thug’ means never having to say you’re sorry.”
—U-Turn (aka Louis), /Weeds/

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“There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.”
—Thought Lisbeth Salander
/The Girl Who Played With Fire/ by Stieg Larson, Chapter 1

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“I hate it when I’m right… wait… no I don’t.”
—Tinkerballa, The Guild S0408

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“We’re not sex offenders: we just had a no-pants candy party for kids.”
—Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Theater, 12-13 Sep 2010

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“Note to self RE: The Fonz: Mark you are not The Fonz.”
—Mark (David Mitchell’s Character)
Peep Show S03E01

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(context: the bones in snakes that form their double-joined jaws share an evolutionary history with the bones in our inner ear)
Phil: So the choice was being able to hear better or being able to eat things bigger than your head?
Frye: Essentially.
Phil: EVOLUTION!! (shakes his fist at the air)
Frye: It can’t hear you.
—QI S08E01

(Stephen Frye and Phil Jupitus)

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Baracas: Why do you need so many of these things? (firecrackers)
Hanibal: Because overkill is underrated my friend.
—The A-Team (2010)

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“This rampant inconsistency, inconsistency both in look and in feel, is perhaps the defining characteristic of the Windows experience. The prevailing sense that nobody really cares if it’s any good. No one cares that it all feels right, that it does the same thing in the same, predictable way. No one cares if it looks good. Sure. It all more or less works. But shouldn’t we be striving for something better than that? Shouldn’t it work cleanly and efficiently? Shouldn’t it fill us with joy each time we use it?”
—Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/guides/2010/10/the-21st-century-guide-to-platform-trolling-windows-sucks.ars/4

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“You’re going to have to speak up. I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.”
—Ernest Hemmingway (not the real Ernest Hemmingway)
Jesus Christ: In the name of the gun
http://www.jesuschriststory.com/?p=358

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No, moslems don’t believe that Jesus was the messiah.

Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament is the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out, and it retcons the last one like it never happened. There’s still Jesus, bue he’s not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn’t shown up yet.

Jews like the first movie but ignored the sequels, Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count. Moslems think the third one was the best, and Mormons like the second one so much they started writing fanfiction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.
—RandomFerret on SomethingAwful

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Man these royal families never can get along, can they?
—Lina Inverse
/Slayers/ S01E11

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Marvin: Can I just put a bullet in him?
CEO: No. You don’t kill people I kill people. I’m the /bad guy/!
*Joe punches him*
*CEO Snores*
Joe: Not worth a bullet.
—RED (2010) @ ~01:10:00
(Joe is played by Morgan Freeman)

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“I swear man, if we’re ever invaded by an army of inflatable dummies, we are ready.”
—Adam Savage
Mythbusters S08E22

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“Yes we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”
—My materialist slogan
—Daniel Dennet, /Breaking The Spell/

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The same point can be made about science. Since the belief in the integrity of scientific procedures is almost as important as the actual integrity, there is always a tension between a whistle-blower and the authorities, even when they know that they have mistakenly conferred scientific respectability on a fraudulently obtained result. Should they quietly reject the offending work and discreetly dismiss the proprietor, or make a big thing?
—Daniel Dennet, /Breaking The Spell/

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Another eminent Briton is Sherlock Holmes, who is often thought about even though he never existed at all. In /one sense or another/ there are truths and falsehoods about such (mere) intentional objects. It is true that Sherlock Holmes (the intentional object created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) lived on baker street and smoked, and false that President Truman once owned him and rode him to the White House from Missouri. But of course neither Sherlock Holmes nor Pegasus is or ever was real.
—Daniel Dennet, /Breaking The Spell/

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For example, right now I am typing on my keyboard with the intention of creating a coherent story about the logic of postmodernism. Were someone to study me, they might look beyond that surface level intention I just offered and infer instead that what I really am doing is inventing a story from my personal experiences for the purposes of advancing my academic career. To accomplish this, they might argue, I am constructing a discourse that sets me apart from other people and thus increases my value as a writer. Why do I do this? Because I am a self-interested white heterosexual privileged Protestant male who uses knowledge for power (a strategy not of savvy but of manipulation and exploitation). For postmodernists, that which gets presented as truth (e.g. this book) is an invention, just a take on reality, that masks what I really am doing—tricking everyone in order to acquire and maintain power.
—Daniel Dennet, /Breaking The Spell/

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We don’t have to assume there are no moral truths in order to study other cultures fairly and objectively; we just have to set aside, for the time being, the assumption that we already know what they are.
—Daniel Dennet, /Breaking The Spell/

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“I’m not looking for anything, I just want to fucking know the truth for a change.”
—Silas Botwin, Weeds S06E11 @~00:21:30

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Zelgodas: So where are we going now?
Lina: Well let’s just start walking and figure that out later.
—Slayers Next #31

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“[Aliens] might have 19 different versions of ‘left’. Imagine putting that in your sat-nav.”
—Johnny Vegas, QI S08E08

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Hannah: “What’s the big deal? I’ve been shot at, you’ve been shot at.”
Boothe: “Well it’s not like you build up an immunity to gunshot wounds.”
—Bones S06E05
(Boothe doesn’t want to let Hannah into the line of fire)

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The only thing we could all agree on, was there had to be a fireball.
—Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, 2010-11-10

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There is no honor in what I do, but I do it as honorably as I can.
—Jon Stewart, The Rachel Maddow Show, 2010-11-11

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I come through the Valley of Death and all you can think about is your stomach.
—Patrick Jane, The Mentalist S03E08

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I’m a scientist remember, I don’t believe in fairy tales.
—Dr. Grace, Avatar

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It’s not just a rorshack test, it’s a petri dish.
—Adam Savage, Mythbusters S08E23

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Dayle: What is it?
Alicia: It’s a bomb.
Dayle (to Michael): Can you defuse it?
Michael: Maybe… Maybe not.
Sam: Do you guys have any Duct Tape?
—Burn Notice S04E13

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Conan: You can’t put “super” in front of any word.
Jon Hamm: I super-certainly can.
—Conan 2010-11-10

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This is America, we don’t have adult conversations: we have Twitter.
—Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 2010-11-12

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Thief: I have this small somewhat impressive shiv[.]
[…]
Thief: I give you my word though that I would cut you in such a manner that your recovery would be a matter of… weeks.
Shawn: ‘com on Gus, given the circumstances, I’d say that was pretty damn considerate.
—Psych S05E10

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Debra Morgan: Do some people deserve to die?
Dexter Morgan: Some people don’t deserve to live.
—Dexter S05E08

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Creation and destruction, I suppose we’ll have to hope for the former.
—Dr. Walter Bishop, Fringe S03E06

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The kind of journalism [Ted Koppel] eulogizes failed this country; because, when truth was needed all we got were facts, most of which were lies anyway.
—Keith Olbermann, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, 2010-11-15

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Richard Castle: I’m not asking you to dye your hair red and call me “Molder.”
[…]
Det. Kate Becket: Please, let’s just stick it in and get this over with.
—Castle (2009) S03E09

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Espinoza: Do you think we’ll get a medal for this?
Unknown Govt Agent: This never happened.
Richard Castle: I guess that means I can’t put it on Twitter.
—Castle (2009) S03E09

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Dr.: The seller, Alberto DeSchmidt, better known as “The Belgian”
Chuck: Well I bet I know how he likes his waffles.
—Chuck S04E08

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Any sufficiently advanced financial device is indistinguishable from fraud.
—xthlc
http://www.metafilter.com/97656/Multiply-this-by-HOW-MANY-mortgages-out-there#3377626
Nov 16, 2010 @ 1:31 PM

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That’d be like posting it on my facebook page, if I had a facebook page, or the desire to share intimate details with people I’d avoid on the street.
—Shawn Spencer, Psych S05E11

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Let’s just say I was terrorized by a flock of Canadian geese at my uncle’s house in Saskatchewan; they were Canadian I thought they’d be friendly.
—Hodges, CSI S11E09

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Consider taking some anti-psychotics, I could recommend a few good generic brands… I mean just because you’re delusional doesn’t mean there’s any reason for you to overpay.
—Guster, Psych S05E11

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Finn: Say, how do I kill this guy anyway?
Marceline: Finn! you can’t kill my dad…
Finn: I didn’t mean… I uh… not like that…
Marceline: No, no, you can’t kill my dad: he’s deathless.
—Adventure Time with Finn & Jake, S02E01

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Patient: Faith is not a disease.
Dr. House: Of course not. Then again it is communicable and kills a lot of people.
—House S07E08

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Sucking at something is the first step toward being sort of good at something.
—Jake the Magic Dog, Adventure Time with Finn & Jake, S01E25 His Hero

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Man, I think us not being violent is hurting people.
—Finn, Adventure Time with Finn & Jake, S01E25 His Hero

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Finn: That’s bizonkers!
Gnome: Yes, but the engineering is sound.
—Adventure Time with Finn & Jake, S02E07 Power Animal

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But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?
—Johnny Depp (sarcastically, in response to whether Jack Sparrow is gay)
http://www.deadline.com/2010/11/depp-disney-hated-his-gay-jack-sparrow/

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Quit ruining my story with your logic.
—Richard Castle, Castle (2009) S03E10

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Every physicist wants to violate Einstein, but thus far the great man has remained pretty chaste.
—George V. Neville-Neil
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1900007

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Celebrities have always existed. […] These days, however, fame is more easily attained, anyone with enough money and a lack of self-respect can become famous by being famous: we’ve gone from Socrates to Snooki.
—Dr. “Ducky” Mallard, NCIS S08E11

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Abby (CGIS): Is this a record?
Abby (NCIS): No, we don’t talk about the record, it got ugly.
on the record of most CafPow consumed
—NCIS, S08E11
(CGIS = Cost Guard Investigative Service)

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Regardless of your politcal views on this issue, there are facts, and they’re worth looking up.
—Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, 2011-01-13

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Scientist: You need help? This will help. Sharing information helps. It’s how science works
HLS Agent: Unfortunately it’s not how governments work.
—Pioneer One S01E02

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Are you that kid? If Euclid had been a guest lecturer at your school, would you have been like, “Well you haven’t actually proven The Pythagorean Theorem.”
—House, S07E09
(and that’s one of the reason’s why normal people hate mathematicians)

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House: How many does that make?
*The intern holds up 2 fingers*
House: And how many for you?
*she turns tail and leaves*
House (craning his neck): I’m also kicking your ass at gloating!
—House S07E09

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But living an honest life – for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.
—Ricky Gervais
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist/

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“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, /Crime And Punishment/

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Unlike some other people who shall remain nameless: who are me.
—Rachel Maddow, /The Rachell Maddow Show/ 2010-12-21
Rachel Maddow refuses to name herself.

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Copyright, in its current state, holds information at ransom for monetary value. While in music it can stifle culture and art, with literature and education it can be nothing more than a weapon of class warfare.

[…]

The way I look at it is, if hundreds of thousands of people are downloading my album, I’m contributing to culture and my music will likely outlive me. Money is pretty insignificant in the face of immortality.

[…]

Most importantly, we don’t want poor people to continue being less educated than wealthy people because of the illusion created that information has a monetary value. News, history, media, and culture is made by everyone, and it is intolerable to me that we allow the messengers to hold it from us at such a high price, whether monetarily or contextually.
—Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb (http://theflashbulb.net/2010/)
TorrentFreak Interview December 24, 2010
http://torrentfreak.com/music-is-better-off-on-bittorrent-than-with-apple-or-big-music-101224/

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Middleman: “I’m not an authority figure, I’m more of an independent contractor.”
Wendy: “What does that mean? You build strip malls? Kill People?”
Middleman: “I would *never* build strip malls.”
—The Middleman, S01E01

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Hell, we’ve all had trials Eddie, it’s the convictions that count.
—Ash Morgan
Hustle, S07E05
(so much double entendre! trials & convictions both could mean 2 different things)

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“I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, 'wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
—Marcus Cole
Babylon 5

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“If porn was bad, why would there be so many nuns in it”
—Dr. House
House S07E13

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Revenge kinda sucks… who knew?
—Lia
Being Human (UK) S03E08

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But no software has yet managed to automatically enforce a rule that, in life, things have to make sense.
—http://www.yaboymartell.com/02/2011/auto-corrected-text-leads-to-killing/

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Variety is the whatnot of thingamajig.
—Stephen Fry
http://twitter.com/#!/stephenfry/statuses/38648486333386752

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A deep understanding of reality is exactly the same thing as laziness.
—Wally
Dillbert
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-03-20/

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There is only one God and his name is Death, and there is only one thing we say to Death, and that is “Not today.”
—Swordmaster
Game of Thrones S01E06

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Well I see a lot of bricks, but I don’t know what the building looks like.
—Don Draper
Mad Men S02E04

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No one will tell you this, but don’t be a man. Don’t even try. Be a woman — It’s a powerful business when done correctly.
—Jane Barret to Peggy Olsen
Mad Men S02E05

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Sam: It’s time to serve justice little buddy.
Max: Can we get ice cream afterwords, serving justice always makes me hungry.
—Sam & Max, Episode 1: Culture Shock

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Jen: What kind of man would want to photograph a bunch of beautiful women without any close on, Roy?
Roy: The kind of man who wants to help people, Jen.
—The IT Crowd S03E06

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Girl: I think I’d like to be a Lesbian… but not one of those fat ones, I’d be like a supermodel, and I’d just hold hands, and I’d probably marry a man.
Hanna: What?!?
—Hanna (2011)

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One should no more rack one’s brain about the problem of someone you cannot know anything about exists, than about the ancient questions of how many angels are able to sit on the head of a needle.
—Wolfgane Paull on an aspect of Quantum Physics

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I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
—xkcd mouseover text http://xkcd.com/874/

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Elizabeth: Honey, look at yourself.
Peter: I’m older than poop.
Elizabeth: And you look damn sexy doing it.
—White Collar S03E05

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You should always be yourself.
Unless you can be batman.
Always be a batman.
—Paraphrase from omegle conversation
http://i.imgur.com/3nqNK.jpg

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There’s no such thing as “Not good enough for the internet.”
—Conan O’brien
Conan 2011-08-04

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“Thankfully for us, in Science there are tons of weirdos willing to pick up where others have failed.”
—James Burke
Connections² Ep. 5 Something for Nothing

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“Why don’t *you* try making an imaginary world. It’d probably be like Fresno or something.”
—The Creator of “The Game”
The Guild, Season 5 Episode 3

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I’m a good citizen; I’m a good father; I recycle, and I masturbate.
—Louis C.K.
Louie S02E08

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It is difficult to ignore the responsibility that Ayn Rand bears for all of this. I often get emails from people who insist that Rand was a genius—and one who has been unfairly neglected by writers like myself. I also get emails from people who have been “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” or otherwise saved by the “living Christ,” and who insist that they are now praying for my soul. It is hard for me to say which of these sentiments I find less compelling.
—Sam Harris
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-lose-readers-without-even-trying/

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I want a political operative to blow up Bill Gates’s fence so we can have Gategategate.
—IGotLaserCannons
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/jtbu0/case_closed_climategate_was_manufactured/c2f1qbc

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Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them.
—Tyrion Lannister
A Clash of Kings, Book 2 of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

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My sister is said to have taken a bear for her lover. I’d believe that before one fifteen feet tall. Though in a world where dead come walking… ah, even so, a man must believe his eyes. I have seen the dead walk. I’ve not seen any giant bears.
—Lord Commander Mormont of the Nights Watch
A Clash of Kings, Book 2 of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

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Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure to hide the flavor of their own incompetence.
—Tyrion Lannister
A Clash of Kings, Book 2 of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

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Deckard: What about—not sex—but love
Rick: Love is another name for sex. Like love of country. Love of music. If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex.
—Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Phillip K. Dick

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There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. Because as the song reminds us, *we want to know why*. We may have outgrown the songs’s answer. but we will never outgrow the question. Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity because being who we are, one of the things we deem precious is the truth. Our love of truth is surely a central element in the meaning we find in our lives. In any case, the idea that we might preserve meaning by kidding ourselves is a more pessimistic, more nihilistic idea than I for one can stomach. If that were the best that could be done I would conclude that nothing mattered at all.
—Daniel Dennet, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

Note: Dennet isn’t referring to “the song” metaphorically, he’s referring to a religous song he just quoted.

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Louis CK: When someone says “I want to show you my pussy” I don’t ask if they live in this area code.
Chris Rock: Well you should.
—Louie S02E13

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You see how benevelent I can be when everyone just does what I say.
—President Bartlett
The West Wing, S01E05

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[12:25] <thath> ok, birth date sorting buggery has been resolved
[12:29] *** project2501 sets the channel topic to “thath FTW”.
[12:33] <thath> Fought the War? 
[12:33] <thath> because you are correct about that
[12:34] <project2501> ftw is for the win
[12:35] <project2501> now i have to change the topic again
[12:35] *** project2501 sets the channel topic to “thath FTL”.
#psudrupal@irc.cat.pdx.edu
2011-09-20

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“I’m not stupid, I’m just ignorant of things I don’t RSS”
—Codex
The Guild S05E10

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“[W]e all know that the only true source of randomness is a monkey on a unicycle with a cheese in one hand and its butt in the other.”
—Learn You a Haskell For Great Good
http://learnyouahaskell.com/input-and-output#randomness

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“The free man excels at all he does.”
—Vortigaunt
Half Life 2

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[19:40] <mta> Visual Basic was invented by Allan Turing; he was having a prophetic experience one night after experimenting with cyanide when the gods spoke
[19:41] <mta> It is the most formally pure language known to man
[19:47] <mta> It’s so beautiful, in fact, that mathematicians instantly abandoned 800 years of tradition upon it’s heavenly advent
[19:47] <mta> Sorry
[19:48] <kraytul> you’re… high on… antifreeze?
[19:48] <mta> lol
[19:48] <kraytul> dude, that’s bad for you.
[19:48] <eidolon> this is what peyote will make you think about visual basic
[19:48] <mta> haha
[19:49] <kraytul> eidolon, you sure peyote is strong enough for that effect?
[19:49] <eidolon> good point…
[19:49] <eidolon> hmm
[19:50] <eidolon> maybe one of those fancy shmancy research chemicals everyone is talking about nowadays?
[19:50] <kraytul> ACETONE!
[19:50] <eidolon> there’s gotta be one in there that’ll get you high enough to think VB is divinely inspired
[19:50] <eidolon> OH!
[19:50] <eidolon> huffing glue, that’s it!
[…]
[19:52] <eidolon> Dr. Huffings Adhesive, Aerosol, and Fuel Co.
[19:52] <eidolon> and subsidiary HuffSak Plastic Container Products
[19:52] <kraytul> “It’s the glue that runs your car!”
~~
#cschat@irc.cat.pdx.educated
2011-09-11

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“If I could blow people up with my mind, I could solve all my problems in like, one day. Okay maybe not all my problems, but earthquakes were never on my list until today”
–Gordon Freemen
Freeman’s Mind Episode 21
http://www.accursedfarms.com/movies/fm/fm21/

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This is ridiculous, you're taking advice about men… from a man?
—Sheila
Suburgatory S01E03

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Batista: Don't you play the partner card on me.
Quinn: "Don't you play the partner card on me"? It's for situations like this that the partner card is in the fucking deck.
—Dexter S06E06

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Spade thumped Cairo’s wallet with the backs of his fingers and said: “There’s nothing like five thousand dollars here. You’re betting your eyes. You could come in and say you'd pay me a million for a purple elephant, but what in hell would that mean?”
—The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hemmett

~~

He replied deliberately: “I can’t say yes or no. There’s nothing certain about it either way, yet.” He looked up at the fat man and stopped frowning. “It depends.”

“It depends on–?”

Spade shook his head. “If I knew what it depends on I could say yes or no.”
—The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hemmett

~~

Spade chuckled. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” he said cheerfully. “Well, let’s go.”
—The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hemmett

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We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.
—Casper Gutman, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hemmett

~~

But such concerns clearly rest on an incomplete picture of human well-being. To the degree that treating people as ends in themselves is a good way to safeguard human well-being, it is precisely what we should do. Fairness is not merely an abstract principle—it is a felt experience. We all know this from the inside, of course, but neuroimaging has also shown that fairness drives reward-related activity in the brain, while accepting unfair proposals requires the regulation of negative emotion. Taking others’ interests into account, making impartial decisions (and knowing that others will make them), rendering help to the needy—these are experiences that contribute to our psychological and social well-being. It seems perfectly reasonable, within a consequentialist framework, for each of us to submit to a system of justice in which our immediate, selfish interests will often be superseded by considerations of fairness. It is only reasonable, however, on the assumption that everyone will tend to be better off 
under such a system. As, it seems, they will.
—Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

~~

In opposition to the liberal notion of morality as being a system of “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other,” Haidt asks us to ponder mysteries of the following sort:
    [I]f morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom?
Interesting question. Are these the same ancient texts that view slavery as morally unproblematic? Perhaps slavery has no moral implications after all—otherwise, surely these ancient texts would have something of substance to say against it. Could abolition have been the ultimate instance of liberal bias? Or, following Haidt’s logic, why not ask, “if physics is just a system of laws that explains the structure of the universe in terms of mass and energy, why do so many ancient texts devote so much space to immaterial influences and miraculous acts of God?” Why indeed.
—Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

~~

With respect to our current scientific understanding of the mind, the major religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled, any naïve conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind’s obvious dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of reasoning, feeling love, remembering life events, etc., all the while being metaphysically independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a person suffering from total aphasia (loss of language ability) still speak and think fluently? This is rather like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin. The specific character of the mind’s dependency on the brain also suggests that there cannot be a unified self at work in each of us. There are simply too many separable 
components to the human mind—each susceptible to independent disruption—for there to be a single entity to stand as rider to the horse.
—Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

~~

It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect people who are seeking to maximize their well-being to also value fairness. Valuing fairness, they will tend to view its breach as less than ethical—that is, as not being conducive to their collective well-being. But what if they don’t? What if the laws of nature allow for different and seemingly antithetical peaks on the moral landscape? What if there is a possible world in which the Golden Rule has become an unshakable instinct, while there is another world of equivalent happiness where the inhabitants reflexively violate it? Perhaps this is a world of perfectly matched sadists and masochists. Let’s assume that in this world every person can be paired, one-for-one, with the saints in the first world, and while they are different in every other way, these pairs are identical in every way relevant to their well-being. Stipulating all these things, the consequentialist would be forced to say that these worlds are morally equivalent. Is this a problem? I don’t think 
so. The problem lies in how many details we have been forced to ignore in the process of getting to this point. What possible reason do we have to worry that the principles of human well-being are this elastic? This is like worrying that there is a possible world in which the laws of physics, while as consistent as they are in our world, are completely antithetical to physics as we know it. Okay, what if? Exactly how much should this possibility concern us as we try to predict the behavior of matter in our world?
—Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

~~

Nozick draws the obvious analogy and asks if it would be ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings. Provided that we take the time to really imagine the details (which is not easy), I think the answer is clearly “yes.” There seems no reason to suppose that we must occupy the highest peak on the moral landscape. If there are beings who stand in relation to us as we do to bacteria, it should be easy to admit that their interests must trump our own, and to a degree that we cannot possibly conceive. I do not think that the existence of such a moral hierarchy poses any problems for our ethics. And there is no compelling reason to believe that such superbeings exist, much less ones that want to eat us.
—Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

~~

“You got millions of those Young Mafia types,” Y.T. says.
“All destined to wear blazers and shuffle papers in suburbia. You don’t respect those people very much, Y.T., because you’re young and arrogant. But I don’t respect them much either, because I’m old and wise.” (Uncle Enzo)
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

“Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing — is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

“It’s like, if you — people of a certain age — would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn’t have to take these drastic measures.”
—Y.T. on her Mom
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

“Then how come everyone’s scared of you?” (Y.T.)
Raven turns to her, smiles broadly, shrugs. “Oh, because I’m an incredibly ruthless, efficient, cold-blooded killer, you know.”
Y.T. laughs. So does Raven.
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

“I’m sure they’ll listen to reason,” Fisheye says.
“These guys aren’t scared of the Mafia, if that’s what you have in mind,” Eliot says.
“That’s just because they don’t know us very well.”
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. “As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly — causing them to jump out of windows — weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye.”
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

Another simple and obvious question. “So, I feel like I understand her now.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, well, sort of.”
“And is that supposed to be a good thing?”
“Well, sure.”
“Hiro, you are such a geek. She’s a woman, you’re a dude. You’re not supposed to understand her. That’s not what she’s after.”
“Well, what is she after, do you suppose — keeping in mind that you’ve never actually met the woman, and that you’re going out with Raven?”
“She doesn’t want you to understand her. She knows that’s impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.”
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

“How do I stop this thing?” Hiro says.
“Beats me. I just deliver ‘em,” Raven says.
“Do you have any concept of what you just did?”
“Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition,” Raven says, a huge relaxed grin spreading across his face. “I nuked America.”
Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises to its feet and shrieks.
—Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

~~

He’s an asshole. Always was an asshole. Always goin’ to be an asshole. Some people is jes’ assholes, and that’s an end of it.”
—American Gods, Neil Gaiman

~~

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I 
believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the 
universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” She stopped, out of breath. 
Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, “Okay. So if I tell you what I’ve learned you won’t think that I’m a nut.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Try me.”
—American Gods, Neil Gaiman

~~

“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”
—Neil Gaiman, American Gods

~~

 The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine. Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake.
—Neil Gaiman, American Gods

~~

“I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.”
—Shadow, American Gods by Neil Gaiman

~~

There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.
—Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

~~

The pattern of sexual mores-insofar as there had ever been a single pattern—had altered radically. It had been virtually shattered by two inventions, which were, ironically enough, of purely human and and owed nothing to the Overlords. The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the second was an equally infallible method—as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood—of identifying the father of any child. The effect of these two inventions upon human society could only be described as devastating, and they had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration.
—Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End
(lulz, ever the optimist aren't we Mr. Clarke?)

~~

“As you doubtless know, sir, one of the great problems of our culture has been the dichotomy between art and science. I'd very much like to know your views on the matter. Do you subscribe to the view that all artists are abnormal? That their work—or at any rate the impulse behind it—is the result of some deep-seated psychological dissatisfaction?”
Professor Chance cleared his throat purposefully, but the Inspector forestalled him.
“I've been told that all men are artists to a certain extent, so that everyone is capable of creating something, if only on a rudimentary level. At your schools yesterday, for example, I noticed the emphasis placed on self-expression in drawing, painting and modelling. The impulse seemed quite universal, even among those clearly destined to be specialists in science. So if all artists are abnormal, and all men are artists, we have an interesting syllogism…”
—Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

~~

“No-one of intelligence resents the invevitable.”
—Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

~~

Patent law, including the law of copyright, is a repository of our practical grasp of the question. How much novelty of design counts as enough to justify a patent? How much can one borrow from the intellectual products of others without recompense or acknowledgment? These are slippery slopes on which we have had to construct some rather arbitrary terraces, codifying what otherwise would be a matter of interminable dispute. The burden of proof in these disputes is fixed by our intuitive sense of how much design is too much design to be mere coincidence. Our intuitions here are very strong and, I promise to show, sound. Suppose an author is accused of plagiarism, and the evidence is, say, a single paragraph that is almost identical to a paragraph in the putative source. Might this be just a coincidence? It depends crucially on how mundane and formulaic the paragraph is, but most paragraph-length passages of text are "special" enough (in ways we will soon explore) to make independent creation highly unlikely. 
No reasonable jury would require the prosecutor in a plagiarism case to demonstrate exactly the causal pathway by which the alleged copying took place. The defendant would clearly have the burden of establishing that his work was, remarkably, an independent work rather than a copying of work already done.
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!" If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the 
assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."
—Daniel Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself. (The ball
is now in your court.)
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

[B]y the time God has been depersonalized to the point of being some abstract and timeless principle of beauty or goodness, it is hard to see how the existence of God could explain anything.
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

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
(Via Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennet)

~~

The truly wise engineer works not contra naturam but secundum naturam.
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

Anyone who worries about “genetic determinism” should be reminded that virtually all the differences discernible between the people of, say, Plato’s day and the people living today—their physical talents, proclivities, attitudes, prospects—must be due to cultural changes, since fewer than two hundred generations separate us from Plato.
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

The nucleic acids invented human beings in order to be able to reproduce themselves even on the Moon.
—Sol Spiegelman, quoted in Eigen 1992, p. 124
via Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and
critic. Who's in charge, according to this vision—we or our memes?
There is no simple answer to that important question. There could not be.
We would like to think of ourselves as godlike creators of ideas, manip-
ulating and controlling them as our whim dictates, and judging them from an
independent, Olympian standpoint. But even if this is our ideal, we know that
it is seldom if ever the reality, even with the most masterful and creative
minds.
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making
mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the
others to help with the corrections.
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

To make progress in understanding all this, we probably need to begin with simplified (oversimplified?) models and ignore the critics' tirade
that the real world is more complex. The real world is always more complex, which has the advantage that we shan't run out of work.
—John Ball 1984, p. 159
via Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

A vigorous debate ensued among the panelists and audience, capped by an
observation from Chomsky's colleague at MIT Marvin Minsky: "I think only
a humanities professor at MIT could be so oblivious to the third 'interesting'
possibility: psychology could turn out to be like engineering."
—Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot
also be intelligent. There are several theorems which say almost exactly
that. But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence may
be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility.
—Allan Turing 1946, p. 124
via Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

~~

Q. Can you prove mathematics itself is valid.
A. Only to another mathematitian.
—Foundation by Isaac Aasimov

~~

Hardin as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be mearly that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliablepeople.
—Foundation by Isaac Aasimov

~~

The temptation was great to muster what force we could anput up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect—but, nearly invariably, the stupidest.
—Foundation by Isaac Aasimov

~~

There's somthing about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the wellfare of your immaterial problematical soul.
—Foundation by Isaac Aasimov

~~

“Well, come now. Since when does prejudice follow any law but its own[?]”
—Foundation by Isaac Aasimov

~~

This situation may be paradoxical, but it is also universal. For decades Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting. In Kansas we merely see an extreme version of this mysterious situation. The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawood toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. “We are here,” they scream, “to cut your taxes.”
—Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas

~~

Conservatism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Conservatism does not defend some established order of things: It accuses; it rants; it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions. While liberals use their control of the airwaves, newspapers, and schools to persecute average Americans—to ridicule the pious, flatter the shiftless, and indoctrinate the kids with all sorts of permissive nonsense—the Republicans are the party of the disrespected, the downtrodden, the forgotten. They are always the underdog, always in rebellion against a haughty establishment, always rising up from below.
—Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas

~~

The power of their shared vision of martyrdom is sufficient to overcome any set of facts that are merely material, merely true.
—Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas

~~

Sam: My Idea is totally unviable?
Josh: Well you're a Democrat: It's a pretty big club.
—The West Wing, S03E17

~~

Money doesn't grow on trees, it gets shat out of the assholes of monsters.
—LastInitial
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/n9tef/hi_im_louis_ck_and_this_is_a_thing/c37eqzb
paraphrasing Louis CK in this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/n9tef/hi_im_louis_ck_and_this_is_a_thing/c37epoj

~~

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom.
—Eric S. Raymond
I try to explain libertarianism to people, and they don't get it, it doesn't help that I think it's B.S. but this helps to get part of the point across.
"Universal Healthcare" from taxes isn't evil in itself, but when you let that kind of shit happen more of it happens.
It's pretty classic slippery slope fallacy, but it's still somewhat valid (slipper slope is only a fallacy in a world where people act totally rationally)

~~

Ethan: I look around and all I can see is how hard it is to find a place to dump a body.
Carol: Do you think the world's designed that way on purpose?
Ethan: Yes mom. If it was too easy to get rid of bodies we'd run out of people. Because as a species we're a disaster.
Carol: You were always the smart one Ethan. (she says that like it's a bad thing)
—jPod S01E01

~~

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn’t for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven’s Achilles’ heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven’s nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it’s all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you’ve got.
—Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

~~

STATISTICS: making social mores feel arbitrary since 1809
—Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal "red button comic"
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2489#comic

~~

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
—Target statistician on data-mining

So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you’ve fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.
—http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
in turn quoting:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

~~

Xev: What kind of robot are you?
790: The kind that wants to live in your underpants.
—Lexx S01E01

~~

[Thursday, March 01, 2012] [15:05:33] <greghaynes> Its all objects, all the way down, until you hit the turtles
#cschat@irc.cat.pdx.edu

~~

Jeff: Someone tell Britta what an analagy is.
Britta: I know what an analagy is, it's a thought with another thoughts hat on.
—Community S03E11

~~

“It was like it [the television] was designed by the same people who designed my thermostat, but they had a lot more screen real estate to fuck up with.”
—Paul Graham (YCombindator) PyCon 2012 Keynote
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

~~

With regards to threads, there are a lot of options, but you prefer coroutines (they are called fibers, Light weight threads, microthreads, protothreads or just theads in various programming languages, causing a Babylonic confusion) as they allow for fine grained concurrency control.
—rslootma
http://blog.incubaid.com/2012/03/28/the-game-of-distributed-systems-programming-which-level-are-you/

~~

Thus the “copy-right,” when viewed as a monopoly right, was naturally viewed as a right that should be limited. (However convincing the claim that “it’s my property, and I should have it forever,” try sounding convincing when uttering, “It’s my monopoly, and I should have it forever.”) The state would protect the exclusive right, but only so long as it benefited society. The British saw the harms from special-interest favors; they passed a law to stop them.
—Lawrence Lessig
Free Culture

~~

But I pressed Alben about how weird it seems that it would have to take a year’s work simply to clear rights. No doubt Alben had done this efficiently, but as Peter Drucker has famously quipped, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”2 Did it make sense, I asked Alben, that this is the way a new work has to be made?
—Lawrence Lessig
Free Culture
(on how fair use shoulod protect the creation of new content, but doesn't since you have to clear the copyright anyway)

~~

[19:18] <clarkb> C is more sane than C++
[19:18] * cbeck walks backwards out of the bar flipping everyone the void*
#cschat 2012-05-11

~~

Do you buy this "Portal To Hell" business?
Well I wouldnt' say I'd buy it, but lets just say I'm window shopping and there's a half price sale on weird.
—Garth Marenghi's Darkplace Ep01

~~

Where’s the inherent urgency in arguing that the threats aren’t as bad as the hype, that military power is being overused, that the defense budget could safely and wisely be scaled back, that maybe this next war doesn’t need us? The only audience for defense wonkery is defense enthusiasts, and they’re not paying the price of admission to hear that defense is overrated.
—Drift: The unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow

~~

The ropes we had used to lash down presidential war-making capacity, bindings that by design made it hard for an American president to use military force without the nation’s full and considered buy-in, have been hacked at with very little appreciation about why they were put there in the first place.
—Drift: The unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow

~~

The otherwise grounded and pragmatic George Herbert Walker Bush was nominating himself for a place among the pantheon of politicians and kings who claimed that one, just one more war would bring world peace.
—Drift: The unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow

~~

“Vietnam was an extremely painful reaffirmation that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply.”
—General Patraeus
(via Drift: The unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow)

~~

Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn’t make every international problem a nail.
—Drift: The unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow

~~

She has herself purposely blurred the supposed distinc­tion between the sacred and the profane, to say nothing of the line that separates the sublime from the ridiculous. It is past time that she was subjected to the rational critique that she has evaded so arrogantly and for so long.
—Misssionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and in Practice

~~

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty a'real respectable causes t' fight for… But when people run outta those, it don't take 'em long t' find all sorts'a supid shit t' keep busy with.
—Commander Baddass
Manly Guys Doing Manly Things by Coaelasquid
2012-03-12
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/1060

~~

Import'nt t' draw that fine line between fightin' dirty an' fightin' stupid.
—Commander Baddass
Manly Guys Doing Manly Things by Coaelasquid
2012-04-02
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/1088

~~

“The loss of choice is a small price to pay for freedom.”
—Dr. Brinkerhoff
Grimm S01E21

~~

Eric's Sister: I had planned for an ambush 13 miles down the road where my driver would be taken out. But that little stunt you pulled.
Eric: Sorry about that.
Eric's Sister: Don't be. It was badass.
(paraphrase)
True Blood S05E01

~~

Don't call people names you dumbass redneck.
—Tera
True Blood S05E01

~~

Jesus H. Christ. If I didn't have any sense of ethics I could be raking in the cash doing niche projects for highly passionate fringe nutcase groups.
—crimsonslide
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/uyvl0/funnyjunks_lawyer_responds_to_the_oatmeal_by/c4zw3wz

~~

Maybe the internet wouldn't be as scary if it had an English accent.
—Kathy
The Big C, S01E09 “The Sting”

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If I wanna be a fool, I'll be a fool. That's my god-given right as an American.
—Jason Stackhouse
True Blood, S05E12

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If copyright law made sense, copyright owners themselves would offer TV streaming on the Internet. But copyright law hasn't made sense for years, and Aereo embraced the madness.
—James Grimmelmann @ Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/2/

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Copyrighted content is the nuclear fuel of the Internet. It powers high-energy innovation, but can cause catastrophic legal meltdown if mishandled. Prolonged exposure has been scientifically proven to cause business-model mutations.
—James Grimmelmann @ Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/4/

~~

Oh, but I didn’t forget the “my truck’s got power” guy. Do affixing nuts to things automatically make those things “more powerful” (whatever that means)? For the lulz, I’d like to see this logic extended further: I want to see nuts on boats, nuts on houses, and of course I want to see the ultimate in genital compensatory logic: gun nutz.
[...] 
It also seems to me that the users of truck nuts need to learn the scientifically important lesson that giving something a scrotum doesn’t mean you’re giving it “more power”; it just means you’re giving it nuts.

Maybe after everybody see that trucks, imbued with nuts, cannot suddenly tow more, or sexually reproduce additional trucks, or fly, then the learning can begin.
—Elie Mystal
http://abovethelaw.com/2011/07/is-a-ban-on-truck-nuts-unconstitutional/

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Mediocrity, I’d venture, is a more or less universal feature of the human condition.
—Corey Robin
http://coreyrobin.com/2012/09/12/why-people-do-hate-teachers-unions-because-they-hate-teachers/

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Context has become the redheaded stepchild of journalism. -Raymond
—http://thedoghousediaries.com/4624

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The trouble with quotes taken from the internet, is you can never know if they are genuine.
—Stephen Fry
QI S10E07

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Max: Is it really a "case" if we don't have a client, and we aren't getting paid?
Sam: The client is Justice, and Justice is blind and frugal.
Sam & Max S03E01 The Penal Zone

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Dr. Isles: She hates me.
Det. Rizzoli: She's 18, she hates everyone over 18... and everyone younger than 18.
—Rizzoli & Isles S03E06 on Isle's long lost younger sister.

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Hajime: Man that guy is tweaked.
Satsuki: No Joke
Hajime: I thought Meth was only bad in Oregon.
Satsuki: Yeah, but it's like he was a totally different person.  ...  I just remembered Leo said the same thing.
Hajime: It's not meth! … (dejectedly) it's another damn ghost.
—Ghost Stories Ep 7 (English Dub)

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Moreover, since consumer confidence affects consumer behavior, there may be all kinds of feedback loops between expectations about the economy and the reality of it.
—Nate Silver, The Signal & the Noise

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Where our enemies will strike is predictable, it's where we least expect them to.
—Nate Silver, The Signal & the Noise

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Viewing human beings as natural phenomena need not damage our system of criminal justice. If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. 
—Sam Harris, Free Will

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On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. It is code, rather than law, that rules. And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame. Code would not get the humor of the Marx Brothers. The consequence of that is not at all funny.
—Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

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But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
—William Goldman, The Princess Bride

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In proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society; the man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse.
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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Floppy disks are like Jesus. They die to become the icon of saving.
/u/eat-your-corn-syrup on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1bxs33/what_words_will_be_obsolete_in_10_years/c9b5he3

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Heisenberg and Schrödinger are out for a drive when they get stopped by the police. The policeman asks Heisenberg "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" and Heisenberg says "No, but I know where I am!". Confused, the officer says "Sir, you were doing 80 mph", and Heisenberg throws his hands in the air and huffs "Great, now I don't know where I am anymore!".
The policeman thinks something is going on, and orders the pair out of the car so that he can search it for contraband. He looks under the seats, in the glove compartment, in the back, and then walks around the car and opens the boot. He stares into it for a moment, turns to Schrödinger and says "Sir, did you know there's a dead cat in here?!", so Schrödinger rolls his eyes and snorts "Yeah, we do now!".

--Shoe
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/29/scientists-favourite-jokes