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#ted

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #ted




Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures. -- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius ↗


— Aberjhani


#gender-equality #genius #giftedness #good-and-evil #madness

In other words, our constitution was designed by people who were idealistic but not ideological. There's a big difference. You can have a philosophy that tends to be liberal or conservative but still be open to evidence, experience, and argument. That enables people with honest differences to find practical, principled compromise. On the other hand, fervent insistence on an ideology makes evidence, experience, and arguments irrelevant: If you possess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant. There is nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. Compromise is weakness. And if your policies fail, you don't abandon them; instead, you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried to their logical extreme. ↗


— Bill Clinton


#design

Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism." These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation," "protective reaction," etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not "terror," [...] "security forces" only retaliate and engage in "police action." These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as "reactive" and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of "terrorism." [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror. ↗


— Noam Chomsky


#terror #terrorism #united-states #violence #design

I kind of feel like I've been eating professionally for a long time. I've tasted everything. If there's a sausage, you know what? I know exactly what it tastes like. I love them all. But right now it's more important for me to not have all that grease and fat in my body. ↗


— Duff Goldman


#body #eating #everything #exactly #fat

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. ↗


— Emma Goldman


#energy #misdirected #naught

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do. ↗


— Dido Armstrong


#about #childhood #decisions #head #i

I really am disappointed when I run into people who are angry I'm leaving office. ↗


— Matt Gonzalez


#angry #disappointed #i #into #leaving

I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6. ↗


— Steven Wright


#map #united-states #humor

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions. ↗


— Daniel Okrent


#complicated #context #fact #issue #opinions

You may marry Miss Grey for her fifteen pounds but you will always be my Willoughby. My nightmare. My sorrow. My past. My mistake. My regret. My love. ↗


— Shannon L. Alder


#love #unrequited-love #humor






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