Jean-Jacques Rousseau

When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

Stockton Rush

At some point, safety is pure waste.

Lunch time meme dump

Hamilton Nolan - Everyone Into The Grinder

Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur

Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.

Joseph Browning

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from skill the ability to access wealth.

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love

Beware of the "Black Swan" fallacy. Deductive logic is tautological; there is no way to get a new truth out of it, and it manipulates false statements as readily as true ones. If you fail to remember this, it can trip you—with perfect logic. The designers of the earliest computers called this the "GIGO Law," i.e., "Garbage in, garbage out." Inductive logic is much more difficult—but can produce new truths.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein (writing about Stranger In A Strange Land)

I was asking questions. I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers. If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception, or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do. A rational human being does not need answers, spoon fed to him on "faith," he needs questions to worry over—serious ones. The quality of the answers then depends on him... But anyone who takes that book as answers is cheating himself. It is an invitation to think—not to believe.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Lost Legacy

When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love

The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of "loyalty" and "duty." Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute—get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

We have to re-humanise the people whose death has been normalised.

@middleeasteye

“We have to re-humanise the people whose death has been normalised.” Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed her decision to use the term "genocide" in Congress when describing Israel's actions in Gaza during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Ocasio-Cortez said that Israel's military operations in Gaza were also endangering the lives of its own hostages who are also at risk of death due to the Israeli manufactured famine.

♬ original sound - Middle East Eye

George Bernard Shaw

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

"Jass and Jassism" [article] - New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1918

[jazz is the] brotherhood of those who, devoid of harmonic and even of melodic instinct, love to fairly wallow in noise. [it is a] manifestation of a low streak in man's tastes that has not yet come out in civilization's wash.

Mark Twain

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Robert Rauschenberg

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Rev. Benjamin Cremer

Beware of any Christian movement that demands the government be an instrument of God’s wrath but never a source of God’s mercy, generosity, or compassion.

Those people are so tangled up in mental health issues and propaganda that they don't know up from down. You'd think reading the Bible would bring them some peace... but that's the thing about books, you have to read them.