“The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.[1]”

“[in America] the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”

“Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, dass Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.”

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

“Writing is a way of revealing the contradictions of life that one would like to resolve. Writing fiction, like poetry, means simply to display those contradictions but not necessarily to resolve them. In fact, the reader, through his interpretive cooperation, decides what the story means.”

“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.”

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

“[…] getting along in society includes some recognition of not being the worst person you can be even though you have a right to do so.”

“When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I’d love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.”

“The cause of poverty is not that we’re unable to satisfy the needs of the poor, it’s that we’re unable to satisfy the greed of the rich.”

“You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest… most foolish failing there is,”

“Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.”

“Did the lights just change? Yeah? Good. I don’t mind if that happens. I just want it to happen for everyone.”

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

“It’s as if the movie satisfied an impossible yet basic human desire to see what our parents were like before we were born and to see what they did that affected what we became—not to hear about it, or to read about it, as we can in novels, but actually to see it.”

“He was a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks”

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“To make your passing easier on loved ones, why not be an asshole your whole life?”

“I think we’ve found the weakness of capitalism: it believes its own grandiose bullshit.”

“America: You can’t get mad at us for what we do because we haven’t thought about the consequences.”

“I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy’, not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and... [More]”

“Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed, and are not does, rage arise.”

“At sea, a fellow comes out,”

“There’s nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.[1]”

“Unlike the Europeans, Americans have never hated the rich, only envied them.”

“Like all reasonable people, I hate all Muslims. Except the ones I’ve met. They seem fine.”