Quotes

[Mark Llew]

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" — attributed to Heather McGhee

[Phantom Gtowner]

"We are the only country on Earth that sees mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. It doesn't happen in other countries. It's not even close. And somehow we become numb to it and we start thinking that this is normal. Instead of thinking about how to solve the problem, this has become one of our most polarized debates."
-Barack Obama on gun violence.

[Mark Llew]

A Prayer

Let me do my work each day;
and if the darkened hours
of despair overcome me, may I
not forget the strength
that comforted me in the
desolation of other times.

May I still remember the bright
hours that found me walking
over the silent hills of my
childhood, or dreaming on the
margin of a quiet river,
when a light glowed within me,
and I promised my early God
to have courage amid the
tempests of the changing years.

Spare me from bitterness
and from the sharp passions of
unguarded moments. May
I not forget that poverty and
riches are of the spirit.
Though the world knows me not,
may my thoughts and actions
be such as shall keep me friendly
with myself.

Lift up my eyes
from the earth, and let me not
forget the uses of the stars.
Forbid that I should judge others
lest I condemn myself.
Let me not follow the clamor of
the world, but walk calmly
in my path.

Give me a few friends
who will love me for what
I am; and keep ever burning
before my vagrant steps
the kindly light of hope.

And though age and infirmity
overtake me, and I come not within
sight of the castle of my dreams,
teach me still to be thankful
for life, and for time's olden
memories that are good and
sweet; and may the evening's
twilight find me gentle still.

— Max Ehrmann (The Desiderata of Happiness)

[Mark Llew]

Gordon Pennycook, Derek Koehler, Nathaniel Barr, and Jonathan Fugelsang won the 2016 Ig Noble Prize for their paper On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.

According to the Globe and Mail, in his acceptance speech, Gordon Pennycook thanked Deepak Chopra, Dr Oz, and a list of 'other personalities and politicians, tobacco lobbyists, climate-change deniers and creationists':

"Your quantum vibrations permeate the transcendent essence of true experience that coalesced into our bullshit... paper" — Gordon Pennycook



For those interested, the paper can be found in Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549-563 http://journal.sjdm.org/vol10.6.html

[Mark Llew]

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” — Isaac Asimov

[Mark Llew]

"You have tried every trick in the book to get out of a prison sentence, and your record does you no credit. This court gets used to hearing a lot of untruths, only to discover that the reality is very different. On this occasion, it is beyond reasonable doubt that you were seeking to sell heroin, yet you claim that when the police stopped you, you totally forgot that you had 78 bags of heroin in a carrier bag up your rectum, with the handles sticking out."
— Sheriff* Ruth Anderson QC, at the trial in Oban, Scotland at the trial of Brian Connolly. He was sentenced to 10 months.

* in Scotland, Sheriffs are judges

[Mark Llew]

"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil" — Alfred North Whitehead

[Mark Llew]

“Overall, the legacy of Barack Obama will be millions of Americans remembering that’s what a president looks like and sounds like. That will stand in contrast to this billionaire bigot putting out insults on Twitter whenever he feels like it. Obama has given a voice to the American people with an unparalleled grace and complexity, and that’s not Donald Trump.” — Neil Sroka

[Mark Llew]

"The [Presidency] is kinda like the little country boy found the hoochie-koochie show at the carnival, once he'd paid his dime and got inside the tent: 'It ain't exactly as it was advertised'." — President Johnson's advice to Richard Nixon as Nixon took office

[Phantom Gtowner]

"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry." -Frank Zappa 1940-1993

[Phantom Gtowner]

"Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult." -Charlotte Whitton 1896-1975

[Mark Llew]

"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT."
— Frank Zappa

[Phantom Gtowner]

"We took everything away from them, then we criticize them for having nothing." -can't remember who but he was talking about black folks.

[Mark Llew]

You Will Lose Everything

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success,
perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body
will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be
smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything
that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and
no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost
has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever
or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you.
This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything,
the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered
everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy
of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

— Jeff Foster

[Mark Llew]

“Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder…

We do not seek the unanimity that comes to those who water down all issues to the lowest common denominator — or to those who conceal their differences behind fixed smiles — or to those who measure unity by standards of popularity and affection, instead of trust and respect.”

— President Kennedy, addressing the Parliament of Canada, 17 May 1961

[Mark Llew]

"[Trump] voters, fed up with the GOP, disdainful of Democrats, and furious at the social justice warriors getting all the media sympathy, are filled with a kind of nihilistic rage. They will vote for Mr. Trump and people like him... because it is guaranteed to piss you off. Will it make their lives materially better? No. But it'll at least make somebody else's worse. Welcome to government by schadenfreude."

— Editorial in the Globe and Mail, 29 July 2017

[Mark Llew]

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." — Thomas Jefferson

[Mark Llew]

"Bullshit baffles brains."

A saying that was fairly common when I was a kid growing up in Georgetown.

I find myself often remembering it again these days, as I watch how American politics is degenerating.

[Phantom Gtowner]

"Three things that can't be kept hidden: The sun, the moon and the truth." -Buddha

[Mark Llew]

"L'absence est à l'amour ce qu'est au feu le vent — Il éteint le petit, il allume le grand." — Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire — it extinguishes the small and inflames the great."

[John_Bailey]

Are you trying to tell me something ?

[Mark Llew]

"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet." — William Gibson

[Mark Llew]

"I haven't met a man who deserves to be as happy as I could make him." — Miss Leonard (my wife's Grade 5 teacher, when asked by one of her students why she hadn't ever got married)

[Phantom Gtowner]

"I can't actually play any musical instrument properly. I can't read music. And here's the New York Times calling me the new George Gershwin." -Elvis Costello (1987)

[Mark Llew]

"Sometimes you have to say that the other guy beat you with a great shot." — Johnny Bower, after a kid asked why he had let in what turned out to be the game-winning goal by Boom-Boom Geoffrion in the 1959 play-offs.