Quotes

A collection of quotes that hit me especially hard or that I think are important to remember.

Views

• "Never express yourself more clearly than you think" -Niels Bohr
• "We reject: Kings, Presidents and Voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code" -Dave Clark from ietf (see rfc7282)
• "When you have a good idea, it’s probably because this idea is already in the zeitgeist of the time. I don’t believe in "ownership" or even "stealing" when it’s about ideas." -ploum
• "i'd encourage you to give it a shot and watch more of it before you decide it sucks because while you will invariably conclude that it sucks, your reasons for thinking it sucks might very well change" -juice in 20020 chapter 3
• "When you vote with your dollar, people with more money get more votes" -alt-right play book, always a bigger fish 19:30
• "A machine built to end war is always a machine built to continue war" -ultrakill 7-4 book
• "Trade is something very old. In the state of nature, trade is something people do with their enemies. They don't trade with their kin." -against history against leviathan, chapter 3 page 33
• "Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something" -jason.xyz
• "Governments exist for the good of all, if they arnt that then they're a tyrrany that should be overthrown" -12 bytes Page 40
• "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - The classic Usrula K. Le Guin quote
• "He was not a cold-blooded rationalist. He was no calculating machine. He was a great humanist whose religion lay in loving his fellow men and trying to serve them... He knelt reverently in respect to a friend or friend's faith, but he never pretended to be anything other than what he was, a humanist." - Jennie Lee (wife) describing Aneurin Bevan after his death. In my opinion, a solid description of what we should aim to be.

Pretty Words

Us

• "Art is a natural human behaviour, not a skill. Stop trying to be good at smiling" -A random stranger on mastodon who I cant find anymore
• "You're too fixated on finding a meaning to your existence that you've forgotten to actually exist" -samael homesick
• "How strange it is to be anything at all" - Closeted gay christian child in the youtube comments of a twilight video
• "Fix your heart or die" -Gordon from twin peaks to terfs
• "This is an artist giving their all to their art" -Cronenberg on trans people
• "I declare that the capitalists are wrong. Human nature is to form bonds, to build together. This is why we have societies, technology, language. Do you know that the most developed parts of our brains are the language centers? They are freakishly large, evolved specifically to allow us to collaborate, share knowledge, build an understanding of the world together to collectively survive. We are a social species, and that is our strength." -Zach Tsiakalis-Brown/Zulubo

Politics And Making Things

• “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” -Antonio Gramsci
• "The smart forager doesn't nesessarily come home with lots of what they want but none of what they dont" -Sophie from Mars, the world isn't ending
• "When did we decide it was more fun to own everything than take care of it?" -Randy, book of randicus
• "Silver bullets are for killing werewolves, not building technology" -Jim Nielsen in Contract is clarifying
• "The ultra-centralism asked by Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit. Lenin's concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party--to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than to unify it..." -Rosa Luxemburg on her contemporary, Lenin
• [in the context of the internet being unfriendly to humans and full of scams] "If you think you’re not this stupid, you are privileged and need to have more solidarity with your fellow human beings." - Never forgive them by Edward Zitron, imo a good view for most of politics too, people are constantly convinced the average voter is an idiot. Stop that.
• Discourse empowers communities to set boundaries the community agrees on, providing tools to democratically govern and strongly moderate by enforcing these boundaries. -Jeff Atwood

Things Friends Have Said

• "Brains are just machines that have thoughts, we don't really have much of a choice there, what we do have a choice about is what the body does with those thoughts. We exist in the interface between a thinking machine and the physical world" - Bob Vaughan-Williams
• "Everyone thinks they're a good person" - One of the last things Snake said to me