Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Dec 012010
Dec 012010
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Dec 012010
The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching, and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace. [from It’s the Context, Stupid]
This seems even more important now that when Paul wrote this in the 1990s.
Nov 232010
They used to say knowledge is power. I use to think so, but I now know that they mean money.
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
I do not like the word ‘bomb’. It is not a bomb, it is a device which is exploding.
Jacques LeBlanc, French Ambassador to New Zealand, on French nuclear testing
The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.
Antonio Gramsci – Letters from Prison (1946)
Today we stand at the edge of a great abyss. Tomorrow, we take a giant step forward.
Leonid Kuchma -quote by the former president of Ukraine
We declared war on terror, it’s not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I’m sure we’ll take on that bastard ennui.
Jon Stewart
There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
Bertrand Russell
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
We suffer from a lag in which the slow horse of meaning is unable to keep up with the fast horse of mere information.
Orrin Klapp from Overload and Boredom
The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
Slavoj Zizek – “Irma’s Injection” [on Freud’s Dreams]. LRB 25 May 2006.
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin
By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.
Alfred North Whitehead
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. MUSIC is best.
Frank Zappa
Nov 232010
There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man.
True nobility is being superior to your former self.