Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Andy Warhol

You have to be willing to get happy about nothing.


What particular nothing did he have mind?

The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.

So, is that why we're here?

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, "I knew he loved me when he didn't come in my mouth."

Different strokes, say.

Most people in America think Art is a man's name.

Not that it isn't, of course.

Why do people spend their time being sad when they could be happy?

They can't afford to be?

Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.

Okay, but what's that make philosophy then?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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William Styron from Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.


All that technical stuff, let's call it. All the stuff that is often "beyond our control." Even in a free will world.

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

Yo, God! For Christ's sake...why?!!!
And, yes, Lord, I speak from personal experience.


At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts.

Thank God for small favors?

One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

And how depressing is that?

Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.

What's up, Doc? And not just with that.

I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.

See? The brain in thrall. To, for example, the laws of matter.
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Agent Smith
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Re: Quote of the day

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Eli wrote:’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Joyce Carol Oates from We Were the Mulvaneys

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.


Once again, pick one:
1] genes more than memes
2] memes more than genes


Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Death let's call it.

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

See, I told you.
Repeatedly, right?


Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.

Like posting here, he grimaced.

Oh, it’s a terrible, cruel thing—first you’re young, and that takes up such a long time you think it’s forever, then suddenly you’re not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there’s just the one way out.

Of course, she's only paraphrasing Emil Cioran.

P.J. said, That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know.
Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it.
Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.


A hell of a lot more here.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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J.G. Ballard from The Atrocity Exhibition

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.


And then those who emerged from Las Vegas.
But point taken.


All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

Next up: the theme park here.

Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.

Actually, I wouldn't go that far.

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

Actually, I wouldn't go that far.
On most days.


The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant?

Let's exchange strategies.

A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.

Any banal celebrities here?
Well, other than me, right?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Clarence Thomas Promises To Adopt Code Of Ethics For The Right Price


Let's all pitch in here and get this done.

To Rupert Murdoch: “You’re Australian. Are Australians white?”

Yep, from Tucker Carlson.

Sick Boy’s ‘Visit To Heaven’ Sounding More And More Like Wet Dream

Aren't they all?

Nation’s Top Pseudoscientists Harness High-Energy Quartz Crystal Capable Of Reversing Effects Of Being Gemini

Yo, Fixed Cross! What's up with that?

Postal Service Releases Stamp With Anus On It To See If Anyone Cares What’s On Stamps Anymore

Imagine licking it.

Pinwheeling, Out-Of-Control Horse Crashes Into Kentucky Derby Stands

Out of the running as it were.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Gabriel García Márquez from One Hundred Years of Solitude

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.


Or several.

The world must be all fucked up, he said then, when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

Or, here, when philosophy is reduced down to this.

She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.

Also the history of woman. Doubled at least.

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it, he said with deep bitterness. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.

Or, for some, good luck.

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

Try this: "I plead pinhead as a mitigating circumstance."

Science has eliminated distance, Melquíades proclaimed. In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.

Talk about prescience!!
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Bret Easton Ellis from American Psycho

...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.


And then of course my own rendition of that.

All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.

A show of hands please.

I have to return some videotapes.

Uh-oh...

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

Both works for me.

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.

Unless, of course, it's all just in his head.

I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

Yo, Mr. Pinhead, defend yourself.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Harry G. Frankfurt from On Bullshit

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.


How about, oh, I don't know, we choose a context and discuss this?

As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

See, I told you. Sort of.
Next up: your own bullshit here, Mr. Pinhead.


It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Though, sure, let's give some here the benefit of the doubt and say it's...subconscious?

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

Their bullshit, not ours.
That will no doubt never change.


Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Ah, where things [rooted existentially in dasein] can get even more...problematic?

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

The part, let's say, where something becomes true morally or politically because you believe that it is.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Stephen Hawking from A Brief History of Time

We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?


Not to worry. I'm sure before we die it will all be explained to us by scientists. And, if not, by God after we die.

...if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.

Blah, blah, blah, in other words?

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: "What did God do before he created the universe?" Augustine didn't reply: "He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.”

Anyway, seriously, what about this time business?

Einstein never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement “God does not play dice.”

God plays solitaire. And has never once lost.

You cannot predict the future.

Of course, when he said this everyone could predict that someday he'd die. And, in fact, it runed out they were right: March 14th, 2018.

A million million million million miles, the size of the observable universe.

Thank God for wormholes.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Area Mom Off Thinking About Princess Diana Again


Who doesn't?

Psychotic Break Really Helping Man Come Out Of Shell

Of course: whatever works.

‘I Guess I’ll Watch Another,’ Says Woman Unaware Boyfriend Died On Couch 4 Episodes Ago

Don't you just hate that?

911 Operator Likes To Let It Ring For Couple Seconds So Caller Doesn’t Get Impression They're Standing By Phone All Day

And it works!

‘Do You Mind If I Put You In My TikTok?’ Asks Younger Cousin About To Ruin Your Life

This is actually a real thing, isn't it?

Brett Favre Makes Amends By Sending Photo Of His Penis To Every Mississippian On Welfare

Well, he is a slimeball after all.
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Agent Smith
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Re: Quote of the day

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Cassandra Lang wrote:It's never too late to stop being a dick!
:mrgreen:
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.


How ridiculous is that?
It is ridiculous, right?


Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

How ridiculous is that?
It is ridiculous, right?


For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return.

Baltimore? Forget about it.

There is no language without deceit.

Of course, as far as we know, that's only on this planet.

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
But which is the stone that supports the bridge? Kublai Khan asks.
The bridge is not supported by one stone or another, Marco answers, but by the line of the arch that they form.
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.
Polo answers: Without stones there is no arch.


Next up: we rank the 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid.

The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.

Mainly fast food restaurants.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Aldous Huxley from Brave New World

This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.


My guess: women too.
Though for different reasons perhaps.


In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

My guess: women too.
Though for different reasons perhaps.


What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Don't even pretend you call tell us.

Can you say something about nothing?

Sure, but what nothing in particular?

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.
But God doesn't change.
Men do though.


No, really, actually think about that this time.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Especially that one.
Right, Don?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Chuck Palahniuk, from Fight Club

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.


Define everything?

I don't want to die without any scars.

Or, sure, I don't want to die period.

You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.

Not to God, anyway.

Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship.

It was, wasn't it?

Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments?

Yo, Satyr!

I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

Next up: the first rule of course.
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