#p

The true axis of evil in America is the brilliance of our marketing combined with the stupidity of our people. ↗

— Bill Maher

#marketing

Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#privilege #profit #robert-putney-drake #equality

With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high. ↗

— Ayrton Senna

#experience

I write nonfiction because individuals are unique and go through different experiences, our collective experiences enhances all our lives. ↗

— Thaddeus Lawrence

#experience

An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#progress #marketing

It is morally appalling for the so called liberators of South Sudan to keep liberating their own people from a war that has already been won. ↗

— Duop Chak Wuol

#morality #republic #war #liberalism

Don’t allow past experiences to be forgotten. Hold them close. ↗

— John-Talmage Mathis

#past #experience

We stand separate from the world because of our gifts. Never forget that, because you may be sure the world never will. ↗

— P.C. Cast

#neferet #separation

Annabeth realized that if six of them went on these two quests, it would leave Percy alone on the ship with Coach Hedge, which was maybe not a situation a caring girlfriend should put him in. Nor was she eager to let Percy out of her sight again—not after they’d been apart for so many months. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#coach-hedge #percy-jackson #percy-jackson-and-the-olympians #relationships #separation

Power must never be trusted without a check. ↗

— John Adams

#scope-of-government #separation-of-powers #separation