Quotations with links

"I found out I would rather be a brat and take whatever I got than lose my identity. I learned that you could be screaming and begging and curled up in a corner, and still in your head be thinking about your next move. I learned that there was a part of you, if you could keep it for yourself, that would not listen to fear. I learned that if you got angry enough, nothing mattered anymore."--chaotic idealism

"It is far easier for employers and hucksters to ally with ISPs than it is for the little people to maintain the needed gossip flow. ISPs are employers and hucksters too."--Altoid

"The need for human labor is minuscule now, and most jobs are created merely to keep as many people off the streets as possible--not because their labor is needed, but so they can be credit-worthy consumers. Given our global material abundance and overcapacity, what we need now more than anything are consumers, not laborers, but we lack the imagination and will to create a system which accepts and deals fairly with this fact."--Jim Dator

"Imagine yourself having grown up using your fingerprint as proof of who you are, and giving it to every corporation that asks for it. What kind of person would you grow up into? Probably just a person who thinks that biometric scanning and the use of personal information by corporations is just the way things are. Let's turn it around... you have grown up in this world. You grew up in a world where various forms of institutions control your birth, education, work, leisure and death. Can you think of a single activity in your life that is not mediated by a corporation or institution?"--jason

"What would happen if we stopped compromising, stopped playing their game altogether and concentrated all our efforts on creating channels of our own for spreading ideas in new ways? "--CrimethInc

"One of my classmates said something the other day in regard to the march in Cincinnati entitiled 'Way of the Cross, Way of Justice' that I have been thinking about ever since. In effect her comment was 'Why march against poverty, who isn't against poverty?' But the first thing I said was 'if you need people to work for a dollar an hour so that you can sell your goods it is in your interest to have a destitute population from which to draw a work force.' Thus there may not be open advocation of poverty but support for a pure free market is really a hidden argument for social Darwinistic ideas that poverty is a necessary element of economic growth."--David Kowalski

"Have we gone from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous thrift, without going through humility and frugality along the way?"--Martin Laplante

"This rhetoric of liberation has led many a talented and idealistic young person to believe that coding, especially for free, is a political statement. In the guise of an anti-establishment, scrappy, can-do underdog attitude, [Lawrence Lessig], [Kevin Kelly] and their colleagues have created an environment in which well-intentioned people really believe that the commercialization of friendship by Facebook is a democratizing force, that it's progressive for technology entrepreneurs to make billions from the work of artists who get nothing, and that posting book reviews on Amazon and movie reviews on Amazon-owned IMDB is contributing to a public good. In which otherwise intelligent people believe that Google and Twitter are somehow morally different from Microsoft and Wal-Mart because their employees are younger and because they use phrases like 'radical transparency' without living up to them."--Tom S.

"A guest speaker in one of my classes many years ago made the observation that banks are for businesses and credit unions are for people."--boehmian rhapsody

"People that want leadership positions shouldn't have them."--The Meek

"I'm leaving the Democratic party if we don't get the public option. And if things keep getting worse I'll just quit voting altogether. Don't think for a second I'm the only one feeling this way, either. There's no point in fighting for people whose only promise is that you'll be less screwed under them than the Repugs."--djtyg

"Physical reality is coercive: there is only so much of any physical thing to go around. Complaining that one or another economic philosophy is 'coercive' is pointless."--The Raven

"In fact, the G8 leaders used current economic concerns to fail to agree on long-term [carbon reduction] goals. Faced with a choice of 'your money or your life,' our leaders have some pretty skewed priorities."--DJ

"Fuck off and die if you've got a problem with me being angry at oppression and oppressors!"--drakyn

"What fascinates me is the extent to which we have allowed the new media to eliminate the freedoms that we had, in the time of videotape, audio cassettes and early computer disks. True, copyright piracy is (generally) bad. But the bloody inconvenience and blithering incomprehensibility of simply using a modern DVD player to watch a film that you already own - let alone record an episode of NOVA - it is why I keep three VCRs in the house, still."--David Brin

"My experience with Alcoholics Anonymous has been that a lot of the people in the meetings smoke. If 12-Step is such a wonderful program and can keep you from drinking why don't these people us the same program to stop smoking?"--admin

"Moooving on ... I was hanging out in the university library the other day and found some cool stuff on teamwork. Now personally I am opposed to teamwork, because it involves other people and cannot be performed individually. However, I am in the MBA program, and teamwork is all the rage."--Christine

"The Revolutionary act is the orchestration of the disappearance of power. Power, like truth, is the empty place you must know how never to occupy, but that you must know how to produce so that others will be swallowed up in it; a strategy of intelligent subversion would also be to avoid aiming directly at power, but rather to force it into occupying the obscene position (power that insists on occupying this place, power that incarnates power, obscene and impure, and sooner or later collapses admist blood and ridicule) - force it into the position of absolute obviousness. For it is there that, mistaking itself for real, it falls into the imaginary - its there that it no longer exists to violate its own secret."--bioæsthetic

"That top 1% should be very afraid of those with nothing left to lose. Howard Hughes was probably smart rather than crazy."--Suzon

"And personally, I despise sales or any kind. Some people like it, some people don’t. I despise it. If I had to do any sales work of any kind, I would be on welfare. YOu don’t take a fish, put him on a bicycle and expect him to be thrilled."--Uppity Woman