Great Quotes III: Source and Context are Key

[Mechanicalsalvation]

I found these somewhere on the net:

-"I am evil so that their fear may have form, so that they might comprehend the uncertainty of a bump in the night, so that they might hold their life as something they must protect! I am evil, I kill, and I destroy so that they might fear me and hold all else as incomparable." "But why you? Why must you suffer their fear?" "Because I am the only one who cares."

"Through action, a Man becomes a Hero
Through death, a Hero becomes a Legend
Through time, a Legend becomes a Myth
And by learning from the Myth, a Man takes action"

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"It is gray because no movement in a democracy can claim a monopoly on virtue or the truth. It is gray because of the back and forth of democratic discourse, which is not the black and white of repression versus freedom. And this, in the end, is a healthy gray."
-Adrian Karatnycky, "Poland's Long Fall From Grace", The Atlantic

 

[cardgame]

"Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

- Bertrand Russel

 

[Hygro]

And then to not starve they make something other than pins and instead of leisure growth we get new kinds of stuff

Yes that is a great quote.

 

[Kyriakos]

Well, yes. Already the world has the resources to allow feeding/leisure with less work hours, if that would mean less incredibly bizarre hyper-gains by the ultra-rich 0.001%.

I am pretty sure there will be a new world war instead of a change there.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"The politics of displacement is the substitution of cultural issues for discussions of issues of economic fairness. So just when it looks like we’re going to pass a tax bill that gives the middle class tax relief, it's time to talk about abortion, sex education in the schools, multilingual education. Just about anything to distract attention from rising inequality and the complicity that government and public policy has in producing it."
-Kevin Leicht, interview with Gillian White, "Is America Having the Wrong Conversation About Income Inequality?", The Atlantic

 

[Kyriakos]

I put on the wrong costume
And was immediately taken for someone I wasn't, and I said nothing and was lost.
When I went to take off the mask,
It was stuck to my face.
When I got it off and saw myself in the mirror,
I had already grown old.
I was drunk and no longer knew how to wear the costume hat I hadn't taken off.
I threw out the mask and slept in the closet
Like a dog tolerated by the management
Because it's harmless,
And I'll write down this story to prove I'm sublime.

More of that poem at http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.html

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

TheMule61: "Shocking... You mean people have always fallen for lame, over-simplified and mostly inaccurate narratives because real life was too complicated and the data is never available? Who knew?"
SFaccountant: "It's very much different from the modern voters, who accept the narratives despite the data being readily available and spoon-fed to them whenever they can be bothered to read more than a single paragraph at once. Progress!"
-comments on "4 Historical Elections That Prove We're All Petty Morons", Cracked

 

[Phrossack]

"A leader advanced on foot to offer combat. He wore a yellow turban on his head and a green robe. His weapon was an iron mace.

He shouted, 'I am He Man, the devil who shoots across the sky. Who dare fight with me?'

...Cao Hong uttered a great shout and jumped from the saddle to accept the challenge...Another slash, and He Man lay dead."

--Romance of Three Kingdoms

 

[gay_Aleks]

I'm confused. Why is Cao Hong killing an iconic cartoon character from the 80s?

 

[Kyriakos]

^That is rasssist

But yes, He Man is a name which wouldn't really be tied to great quotes.

Although great secrets were revealed to him the day he randomly uttered a phrase in front of the gate of some castle.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Unfortunately, the writer of Romance of a Three Kingdoms never expected that He Man would become in the next 3 centuries an icon for crappy cartoons with the sole purpose of selling toys.

 

[Phrossack]

I'm confused. Why is Cao Hong killing an iconic cartoon character from the 80s?

He Man was apparently a former Yellow Scarves rebel. He sided with them against first the Han dynasty and later Cao Cao because the scarves matched his hair, I guess.

 

[Arakhor]

Unfortunately, the writer of Romance of a Three Kingdoms never expected that He Man would become in the next 3 centuries an icon for crappy cartoons with the sole purpose of selling toys.

When you're six, you don't think that they're crappy.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm confused. Why is Cao Hong killing an iconic cartoon character from the 80s?

Some of us just prefer Thundercats, I guess.

 

[Arakhor]

Is it good, bad or just plain sad that I have the all original Thundercats episodes on licensed DVDs?

 

[Traitorfish]

I know a few people who, at some point, acquired that same box-set and later found themselves wondering what had happened.

My theory? Angry witches.

 

[Arakhor]

Angry witches? What had happened?

(I mean, yes, the fifth series was pretty terrible, but I never saw that as a boy, so I don't have a bias to at least liking them once.)

 

[Mouthwash]

"When people vote the way of the IYI elite, it is "democracy". Otherwise it is misguided, irrational, swayed by populism & lack of education." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

[Phrossack]

"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses."

--Edward Abbey