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America’s technology has turned in upon itself; its corporate form makes it the servant of profits, not the servant of human needs.
— Alice Embree, American political activist, feminist
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
– Unnamed Bush administration aide quoted by Ron Suskind in New York Magazine, October 2004 (Note that the aide likely was Karl Rove)
Somewhere, and I can’t find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”
— Annie Dillard (1945- ), American writer, poet, 1975 Pulitzer Prize recipient
When men imagine a female uprising they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women: their guilt, which is the guilt of every ruling class, will allow them to see no middle ground.
— Sally Kempton (1943- ), American writer, feminist
And the only way to avoid playing the game is never belong to a club, class, set or trade union. As soon as you do, you’re accepting someone else’s rules, and as soon as you do that, you start looking down on the other chap with different rules.
— Charlotte Bingham (1942- ), English author of more than 30 historical novels
What is the arms race and the cold war but the continuation of male competitiveness and aggression into the inhuman sphere of computer-run institutions? If women are to cease producing cannon fodder for the final holocaust they must rescue men from the perversities of their own polarization.
— Germaine Greer
Journalism in America is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, and in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalizing effect upon Spain (of which she is unconscious), headlines of murder, rape and rubbish excite and demoralize the American public.
— Margot Asquith
Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
— Ambrose Bierce, American writer, editor
What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of politcal half-wits.
— Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, French statesman
“If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
— Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), author, Nobel laureate
