#venti

Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts. ↗

— J. L. Austin

#ceremonial #character #conventional #general #general character

Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#intelligence #inventive #intelligence

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129) ↗

— Hilary Austen

#conventional-wisdom #effort #extreme-originality #genius #journey

If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement". ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#leftism #noninterventionism #pacifism #peace-movement #iraq

I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#isolationism #middle-east #noninterventionism #respect

And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#convention #fame #science-fiction #self-referential #science

There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying. ↗

— John Thorn

#game #lamentation #much #seventies #woe

I love inventive food, but I want the classic dishes to taste like how I remember them. I get a little bummed out when there is too much fancy stuff going on and it doesn't resemble the original dish at all. ↗

— Drew Barrymore

#classic #dish #dishes #fancy #food

So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington. ↗

— Michael Beschloss

#been #convention #democratic #getting #had

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#advantages #devil #disagreeable #distance #his