#con

But only part of him was listening. Another part, even if it hadn't read Chomsky or Jung or Sheldrake—who had time for dead guys anyway?— at least had a basic understanding of what those guys had gone on about. Quantum nonlocality, quantum consciousness—Desjardins had seen too many cases of mass coincidence to dismiss the idea that nine billion human minds could be imperceptibly interconnected somehow. He’d never really thought about it much, but on some level he’d believed in the Collective Unconscious for years. He just hadn’t realized that the fucking thing had a death wish. ↗

— Peter Watts

#hundredth-monkey #polygenesis #death

That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day. ↗

— Gregory Galloway

#existentialism #death

We lost everything. We even won our own constituency. ↗

— Maryon Pearson

#even #everything #lost #our #own

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99 ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #conservative #corruption #government #plato

A good fighter usually knows, to within a very few seconds, when a three-minute round is going to end. ↗

— Jack Dempsey

#few #fighter #going #good #knows

After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt. They stood him up, his back to the well. In the dark, desperate sky, just above the scalloped line the treetops made, three stars formed a pleading little constellation. No one looked at them, no one cared. This was the time for death, not the time for mercy. ("The Number's Up") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#death #night #night-sky #sky #death

Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution. ↗

— Judith Martin

#almost #contribution #days #did #discreet

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not. ↗

— Judith Martin

#believe #between #come #conservatives #country

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence ↗

— Linda Grant

#politics #death

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.” “Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events. “So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#conversation #delilah-mcphee #humor #jules #paying-attention