#cs

That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#president

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. ↗

— Frantz Fanon

#politics #psychology #revolution #ignorance

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#bbc #language #linguistics #writing #trust

Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic. ↗

— John Rawls

#philosophy #politics #ideology

We all shine on...like the moon and the stars and the sun...we all shine on...come on and on and on... ↗

— John Lennon

#immortality #moon #song-lyrics #stars #sun

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#history #metahistory #politics #tradition #anarchism

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#anarchy #democracy #politics #anarchism

It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another. ↗

— Michael Bakunin

#dialectics #theism #anarchism

Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepended it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous legislation which trespasses on individual liberty. ↗

— Daniel Guérin

#politics #anarchism

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#economics #men