mudil
...joined 15 years ago, and has 8163 karma
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“The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology" — E. O. Wilson
"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." -George Orwell in 1984
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.” - Elon Musk
"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." - Thomas Sowell
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -James Madison
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -Robert A. Heinlein
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." -Thomas Sowell
"If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees." -CS Lewis
"If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." -Aristotle Onassis
"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity." -Charlie Munger
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell in 1984
"I do not put my faith in institutions, but in individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly, and act rightly. They are the channels of moral truth." - Rabindranath Tagore
“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.” - Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men“
“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.” ― George Orwell
"Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume." - Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
"But we’re very clear of our principles and our purpose, which is to be aligned with our Allies, understanding that — I mean, listen, guys, we’re talking about the potential for war in Europe." - US Vice President Kamala Harris, Munich, Germany February 20, 2022