So here we are again with this month’s selection of interesting and amusing quotes.
Visitors should bear in mind that architects can become extremely excited by plasterboard-wrapped columns, structural grids & road markings.
[Olly Wainwright]
The barn-owl turns in the darkness of an oak, and floats forward over fading giraffe-skins of light and shade …
[JA Baker, September]
In the real world, we have to talk about things and find ways to respect each other’s opinion, even when we disagree. A healthy, mutually satisfying relationship involves celebrating the things you love about each other and ignoring, whenever possible, those quirks that you can’t change.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
When people tell you to be afraid, in an ambiguous, unclear situation, you need to wonder why they want you to be afraid, and what they intend to do with that fear of yours.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
Part of the problem here is that our media thrives on instilling fear and inadequacy in people. They want you to be afraid, to feel anxiety, so that you read their article or watch their television show, all so they can sell you shit via advertisements and commercials. Fear about sex and health are two of their main strategies.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to use violence to protect them … Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible without its being underwritten by violence?
[Stephen Batchelor quoted at http://hardcorezen.info/the-zen-buddhist-who-advises-trump-about-nukes/5561]
Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.
[Dalai Lama]
If you want to go bomb somebody, there’s remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist suffering people, then suddenly we become very cost-conscious.
[Andrew J Bacevich, American historian]
The West won the world by applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grand-children’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
[Carl Sagan, in 1996]
Parenting to grow our sons’ relational capacities is all about staying in conversation with them over the years to help them see how powerful their capacities for communication and expression are. It’s about getting them to that tipping point whereby they commit to their own voice over the scripted silences of traditional manhood.
[Mark Greene; “Why Do We Murder the Beautiful Friendships of Boys?” at https://medium.com/@remakingmanhood/why-do-we-murder-the-beautiful-friendships-of-boys-3ad722942755]

So here’s this month’s selection of interesting, amusing or thought-provoking quotes.

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no-one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no-one knows why.
[unknown]

The execution of Brexit has been [the government’s] real undoing, for the simple reason that nobody with the competence to do it has any enthusiasm for it, and nobody with the enthusiasm has any competence. It’s not a bad working definition of the worst idea ever, but that’s democracy. It is fitting that the party that put it on the menu should have to cook it.
Theresa May’s early flirtation with a Kim Jong-un Brexit (we do it my way, and nobody needs to know what that way is because I am glorious) has left her rather weakened, but even that isn’t the problem. Her job now is to manage down expectations, and maturely present a series of choices which are hard because they are all suboptimal.
[Zoe Williams, Guardian]

“Having sex for money is bad because it is counterfeiting feelings” wow dude, I have bad news about every other customer service job ever.
[someone unknown on Twitter]

The academies send more people out into the world with their heads full of inanities than any other public institution.
[Kant to his pupils]

Love is not about sex, going on fancy dates, or showing off. It’s about being with a person who makes you happy in a way nobody else can.
[unknown]

The Bill weaves a tapestry of delegated powers that are breathtaking in terms of both their scope and potency …
It is a source of considerable regret that the Bill is drafted in a way that renders scrutiny very difficult, and that multiple and fundamental constitutional questions are left unanswered.
[House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, Interim Report on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, September 2017]

I am not a liberal snowflake. My feelings aren’t fragile, my heart isn’t bleeding. I am a badass believer in human rights. My toughness is in tenderness. My strength is in the service of others. There is nothing more fierce than formidable, unconditional love. There is not a thing more courageous than compassion. But if my belief in equity, empathy, goodness, and love indeed makes me or people like me snowflakes, then you should know – winter is coming.
[unknown]

He [George Rapp] believed that a prolonged practice of celibacy would restore man’s ability to multiply himself alone, according to God’s original plan for Adam.
[William E Wilson; The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony]
Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.
[Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence]

They were not life forms. They were … non-life forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell. And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time]

Woke to hear Aunt Leonie this morning talking in a low voice as she’s got something floating loose in her head & does not want to disturb it.
[Marcel Proust]

Here’s this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes amusing and thoughtful. There’s a somewhat philosophical theme this month …
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
[Penn Jillette]
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance.  It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.  A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
[Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865]
When you try to form an institution around such a loose set of non-beliefs [Zen Buddhism], and around that kind of idea of what spiritual authority means, you’re going to have some difficulties. How do you get all sorts of people on the same page about something when one of your core ideas is that no two people are ever on the same page about anything?
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/more-buddhist-scandals/5464]
One should never immediately attribute bad intent to a person holding a position one disagrees with.
[Ben Shapiro]
Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.
[Cicero]
Brexit. The undefined being negotiated by the unprepared in order to get the unspecified for the uninformed.
[unknown]
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Beware of purity workers [who are] ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.
[Josephine Butler, 1828-1906]
Naturism brings confidence, positivity and better health for body and mind. After all, we are born this way. We are part of Nature.
Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time]
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
[Douglas Adams]

Our regular monthly round-up of quotes interesting and amusing …
The deeper we go down the internet-porn wormhole, the more it seems narrow-minded to understand porn exclusively in terms of what kind of sex it “teaches” us to have. Because in the streaming era, the amount and diversity of porn we watch exponentially outpaces that of the sex we have … Pornography is more than a mere causal agent in the way we screw. It has also become a laboratory of the sexual imagination – and as such, it offers insight into a collective sexual consciousness that is in a state of high-speed evolution.
[Maureen O’Connor; “Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time” at https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/pornhub-and-the-american-sexual-imagination.html]
The globalists are using cats to depopulate whites. Because cats act as surrogate babies they cause white women to not want to have kids. Cats are like a parasite that sucks the maternal instinct from white women.
[Unknown]
We’re not going to introduce ID cards. We’re going to introduce cards of identification.
[David Davis, Brexit Minister]
Religion is the practice of training minds to ignore evidence, reason and logic and increasing the ability of believing in fairytales of Bronze Age and of being proud of them.
[Raghu K Kanam]
It’s an important problem. It’s important because it justifies the many attempts to solve it.
[Dr Sabine Hossenfelder]
We seem okay with violence, but nudity we race to criticise and censor.
[Eva Mendes]
Devon Rex: a delightfully alien-looking cat described by the The Cat Fancier’s Association as a madcap mix of a “cat, a dog, a monkey, and Dennis the Menace”
Civilised disagreement is the hallmark of intelligent people in a humane and rational society
[Robert Neuschul on Facebook]
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
[Virginia Woolf]
Only you can fill in what’s missing. It’s not something another person can do for you.
[Haruki Murakami]
A number of prostitutes in Nevada, where brothels are legal, have organized as “Hookers for Healthcare” to oppose the healthcare legislation now pending in the US Senate. This poses a real quandary. I don’t know which side to believe. I mean, on one side, there’s this small group of amoral people who every day debase themselves by doing anything, no matter how disgusting and depraved, to please the men who give them money. And on the other side, we’ve got hookers.
[Phil Kloer]
Another round next month.

Time for our monthly selection of amusing, interesting and thought-provoking quotes.
Strong espresso drinks are all that stand between us and total creative defeat.
Hari Kunzru
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man (1871)
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgement simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
Dietrich Sonhoeffen (1906-1945) “On Stupidity” in Letters and Papers from Prison
What a society chooses to allow of female toplessness, as with art, speaks volumes. It is entirely possible to see how a society’s rules governing access to women’s bodies continue, ultimately, to be rules governing what is considered a male property right. There are constant contestations over breastfeeding in public, toplessness on beaches, bare breasted political protesting, and what constitutes obscenity and pornography. In mainstream views and in social media, for example, female toplessness is largely prohibited, while barely camouflaged sexually objectifying pornography, that prioritizes male sexual pleasure, is not.
Soraya Chemaly, from the Foreword to Bare Reality.
There comes a time in life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. Surround yourself with people who make you laugh, forget the bad, and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right. Pray for the ones who don’t. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is part of life, getting back up is living.
Unknown
There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.
Martin Luther King, A Testament of Hope
No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.
Ann Landers
One of Joyce’s most valuable bequests to writers is that none of them ever need to write a novel like Ulysses again; a benefaction unhappily sometimes disregarded, especially in the US. One feels that Joyce, even if pretty able, is not quite in the Proust, Dostoevsky, even Balzac, class; useful to be learnt from, but not to be imitated … His obsession with himself, paying a good dividend in certain respects, was a handicap in others, narrowing the sphere of vision. As regards the novel itself, one wishes the Brothel scene was done in the same manner as the Martello Tower. I feel certain Joyce simply found himself unable to bring that off, falling back faute de mieux on ‘experimental’ methods, not because those really gave a better picture. Perhaps it might be argued this stuck closer to the Ulysses myth.
Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986, 20 June 1986
With thanks to Peter Kislinger
You can outsource anything you like folks, but you cannot outsource the responsibility or the liabilities.
Unknown
Terrorists want people to fear. Demagogues [eg. Trump] encourage fear. Great leaders like FDR say, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Lawrence M Krauss
It is hardest to talk about civil rights after an atrocity. To many people it feels beside the point, or even part of the problem. People are in no mood for “niceties”, for giving terrorists the liberties which they seem hell bent on destroying. These are the danger times. Human rights, civil liberties – whatever you want to call them – are designed for times like this. They are a moral check list. An insurance policy against our worst natures. Because at times like this, when the world is fearful and trust is in short supply, we need to remember that our judgement in the better times was sound … human rights have a lot to offer in this conversation. Not least because as lucid as we feel after a terrorist attack, the policy responses which emerge from the aftermath may simply be wrong.
Barrister Adam Wagner; Rights Information; 5 June 2017
Regulations (and the removal of regulations) are not ends in themselves.
A regulation is there to provide that outcomes will be (are are likely to be) different from what they would be, *but for* the regulation.
Certain bad outcomes can be avoided; certain public goods and public benefits can be achieved. In both cases, individuals would not be able to do this for themselves without the regulation.
David Allen Green at Jack of Kent blog
What, if anything, can be done to prevent further terrorist attacks in the UK? There is a dearth of sensible ideas but no shortage of suggestions from the nation’s politicians and columnists. UK prime minister Theresa May characterised last week’s atrocity as an attack on the UK’s liberal values, and suggested the nation could more expediently resolve this conflict by further abandoning those very same values.
May called for more to be done to make online communications less secure, echoing predecessor David Cameron’s sentiment that there should be no form of communication that the government cannot intercept.
While this strategy would effectively destroy the safe operation of the UK’s digital infrastructure, it does mean we can look forward to an end to religious strife, as gods of all denominations would be sidelined by an all-knowing state. At the pearly gates, British citizens could anticipate being met by a minister clutching their internet search history and a disapproving glare.
“Feedback”; New Scientist; 17 June 2017
Clothes largely cut off the experience of pleasurable sensations of the skin. Natural skin sensation, the play of air, sun, and wind upon the body, can be very pleasurable … The nudist movement almost certainly reflects the desire for more freedom of communication through the skin.
Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy, you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your body and less of your raiment, for the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.
Khalil Gibran