John Cusack as Eddie Thomas, America's Sweethearts

I'm a paranoid schizophrenic, I am my own entourage.

Pascal, Pensées

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Jennifer Gray as Baby, Dirty Dancing

…and most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life, the way I feel when I'm with you!

Alan Perlis

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a little bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Billy Crystal as Harry Burns, When Harry Met Sally

I love that you are the last person that I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night.

Emily Dickenson

To lose thee- sweeter than to gain
All other hearts I knew
Tis true- the drought is destitute-
But then, I had the dew!

Fred Rogers

Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Joey Lauren Adams as Alyssa Jones, Chasing Amy

I came to this on my terms, you know? I didn't just heed what I was taught. Men and women should be together, it's the natural way- that kind of thing. I'm not with you because of what family, society, life tried to instill in me from day one. The way the world is- how seldom it is that you meet that one person who just gets you… it’s so rare. My parents didn't really have it. There were no examples set for me in the world of male/female relationships. And to cut oneself off from finding that person- to immediately half your options by eliminating the possibility of finding that one person within your own gender… that just seemed stupid to me. So I didn't. But then you come along. You- the one least likely; I mean, you were a guy. And while I was falling for you, I put a ceiling on that, because you were a guy. Until I remembered why I opened the door to women in the first place- to not limit the likelihood of finding that one person who'd compliment me so completely. And so here we are. I was thorough when I looked for you, and I feel justified lying in your arms- because I got here on my terms, and I have no question that there was someplace I didn't look. And for me, that makes all the difference.

Alan Perlis

The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.

Michael Douglas as Andrew Shepherd, The American President

You want free speech? Let's see you acknowlege a man whose words make your blood boil, who is standing centerstage advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.

Marcus Aurelius

Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.

S. G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Morgan Freeman as Red, The Shawshank Redemption

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Confucious

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Thomas Edison

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Terry Pratchet & Neil Gaiman Good Omens

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (in a letter to Gen. George C. Marshall, regarding The Holocaust)

The things I saw beggar description… The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the near future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’

Thelonious Monk

I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.

Ulysses S. Grant

Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school… Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church & the private school supported entirely by private contribution. Keep the church and state forever separate.

Kurt Cobain [In Utero (unused liner notes), 1993]

If you’re a sexist, racist, homophobe or basically an asshole, don’t buy this CD. I don’t care if you like me, I hate you.

Kurt Cobain [Incesticide (liner notes), 1992]

If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

I just assume cultists are allergic to facts.

David Frum

Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.

Turkish Proverb

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus.

Carl Sagan

Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want… but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy… try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.

Pete Buttigieg

Chasten, my husband, pointed out that if our kids someday, some Monday morning, come into class, you know, and kids are sitting around and the teacher's got the morning circle talking about how everybody's weekends went, and one of them says, I had the best weekend with my dads, is the teacher supposed to say, No, we don’t talk about that here?

Any age where it's appropriate to talk about a kid's mom and dad, then it should be appropriate to talk about a kid's mom and mom or dad and dad or whatever family structure we live with. That's part of what it means to be pro-family, is to be pro-every family.

Robert Hendrickson, Rector at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Tucson, AZ

This is an awful man, waving a book he hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign interference, exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity.

John Cusack

You don't fight fascists because you're guaranteed to win - you fight fascists because they are fascists- and the people of the world have memory - and they know where these stories end.

What He Said

Unknown (Benjamin Franklin)

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria.

Benjamin Franklin

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

John Candy: Del Griffith (Planes, Trains & Automobiles)

You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I'm an easy target. Yeah, you're right, I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you... but I don't like to hurt people's feelings. Well, you think what you want about me; I'm not changing. I like... I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. 'Cause I'm the real article. What you see is what you get.

Jane Goodall

It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman. That's why there are so many of us.

Tommy Douglas

Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.

Beware the Fascists

Marcus Aurelius

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.

Seeking knowledge/a justified true belief

Virginia Woolf

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness… it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Abraham Lincoln

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Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

A Hacker News comment on Entrepreneurs by notacoward

Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

i have thought about this hacker news comment nearly every day since november ninth twenty seventeen pic.twitter.com/mz5auDBkKl

— josh ackerman (@joshuaackerman) June 7, 2022

Oscar Wilde

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.

Barry M. Goldwater

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.

Too late, we're there

Pope Francis (Condemns Russia's War in Ukraine)

Let there be a decision for peace. May there be an end to the flexing of muscles while people are suffering.

John Stuart Mill

Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.

John Green

Public education does not exist for the benefit of students or the benefit of their parents. It exists for the benefit of the social order.

We have discovered as a species that it is useful to have an educated population. You do not need to be a student or have a child who is a student to benefit from public education. Every second of every day of your life, you benefit from public education.

So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

Ulysses S. Grant

If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason & Dixon … but between patriotism & intelligence on the one side & superstition, ambition & ignorance on the other.

Grant could see it.

Navajo Proverb

You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.