Quotes, Mind Over Grey Matter Edition

Well tell your guitar I think its owner paints it funny.
-- Pteryxx, Blag Hag, comments

You know, I often make the effort to reach out to libertarians, because according to the definition (one who supports maximized individual liberties) I am a libertarian. But again and again I find that so many aren’t really concerned with “freedom”, just freedom from the state. What they really seem to champion is tranferrence of authority from government to powerful interests in the private sector, not minimizing the power of authorities wherever they may be. They want an overlord they can own stock in rather than a system whereby the mob they sneer at can choose their own leaders, and oddly enough the end result would be that libertarians end up with disproportionate power over the lives of those without sufficient capital to buy a stake in the decision-making process.
-- Ben Wolf, Balloon Juice, comments

I have come to the conclusion that dryer lint is the cremated remains of all my missing socks.
-- Facebook post screencaptured on imgur

And sometimes, late at night, he can hear the soft whisper of lactose coming from the fridge.
-- genzagh, Reddit, comments

The thing about fairy tales is that the princess finds her prince, but there’s generally a price to pay. A compromise of some kind is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fairy tale is generally the one who pays the price, which is such a rotten deal. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice in most matters.
-- Roxane Gay, "The Trouble With Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us," The Rumpus.net

When, as a high school junior or senior, I would be heading out for a Friday or Saturday night mom would say “You won’t do anything stupid?” “No mom, of course not. Unless I think of something spectacularly stupid in which I won’t be able to help myself.”
-- pupienus maximus, sadly, no, comments



I’m graduating Saturday from a C[ivil]E[ngineering] program, and I have never been around a group as full of incurious, egotistical, unself-aware people in my life. My med school friends tell me doctors are pretty bad, too, but Jesus…apparently a loose grasp of ordinary differential equations means you never have to question any thought that comes through your head. I enjoy the work, and I’m looking forward to a career, but I am not eager to spend my time around these assholes from 9-5.
-- Big Southern, Balloon Juice, comments

Every day is a battle not to take the easy way out – and leave my family in the lurch by so doing. I’ll endure what pain I have to. I’ll go into debt as far as I have to to keep a roof over their heads and food on their table. As long as I can convince myself that I’m helping them, I can hang on. But what will happen when I can’t convince myself of that anymore? I’m not at rock bottom yet, but it’s just a tiny, tiny stretch away after this fiasco.
-- Ermine, Pharyngula, comments

It's not "edgy" if my granddad could have made the same joke with his friends over beers when he was in college.
-- visp, A View from A Broad, comments

As crappy as it looks from over here, the optimist in me can’t help but see an upside to this. Due to the strict segregation I assume this means that the women will have to learn all about broadcasting. One of the fundamental rules of slavery is don’t teach them how to shoot. And these days video is mightier than the canon.
-- Emptyell, Butterflies and Wheels, on an all-female Middle Eastern satellite channel

I'm an only child, and often when I would do stupid things my mom would say "You know what happened to your brother when he did that?!"
-- Schadenfreudian_slip, Reddit, comments

Arizona is a dystopia, a distillation of everything that is wrong with 21st century American suburbia. Even if you took a group of nice people and stuck them in soulless, climate controlled, faux-communities sprawled out under a blazing sun, these people would gradually become less nice and more paranoid and hateful over a period of time. Arizona’s land developers are like scientists working to create the perfect breeding environment for alienated, delusional sociopaths.
-- Beltane, Balloon Juice, comments

Here’s something else I bet they say down in Greenville: That poor boy is a coupla biscuits shy of a full Sunday dinner.
-- quakerinabasement, TBogg, comments

It’s not at all the case that males are born knowing how to have sex with females – I could cite some rather amusing examples, including one involving a flying diaphragm and a retriever dog.
-- Marcus Ranum, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, beginning a rather tantalizing-sounding story

[A]re these treatments pier reviewed? by pier reviewed, i mean that the practitioners should be tossed off a pier.

They have been rear-previewed…
-- robb and herr doktor bimler, Respectful Insolence, comments

Somebody does every damn stupid thing under the sun. We shouldn’t use that as an excuse to make ordinary sane (or mostly-sane) people’s lives harder.
-- Punditus Maximus, Pandagon, comments

“my freedom never conflicts with anyone else’s, so we don’t need a mechanism to resolve that” is pretty much the fundamental fallacy of libertarianism.
-- Redshift, Balloon Juice, comments

I stage random interventions for addictions people don't have. Silliness is required in life. I also grew up with my parents sitting both me and my brother down at the dinner table, and informing us that they've "made an executive decision and they're going to have to let one of us go".
-- marrella, Reddit, comments

I did this a few years ago after hearing a eulogy about how much someone hated Jews. The family clearly thought it was funny, and they all came up to me laughing afterwards about what a "guy" my uncle was. Since it was a funeral, I did not speak out, but afterwards, my husband (who is Jewish) and I made a donation to the Holocaust Museum in his honor and they sent a nice little note to the family. It is a brilliant way to speak out about racism and hatred.
-- Karen from VA, The God Article, comments

I had this the other day while walking down the street and a man shouted out of his car ‘Smile! Then you might be pretty!’ At this I thought, hang on, I don’t ‘owe’ him pretty, I don’t owe anybody pretty, none of us do. I think there is an underlying idea that men have, fattened up by the media and awful films and adverts that women are really just around for decoration and if a woman is somehow not fulfilling this role, she needs to be told. She automatically gets less respect.
-- Emma Edwards, Blag Hag, comments

To the woman in Walmart with 6 screaming kids, if you're wondering how those condoms got in your cart...You're welcome.
-- A Friendly Suggestion From Your Fellow Neighborhood Wal-Mart Shopper, Failbook

My roommate post-college was an aspiring costume designer. She constructed the costumes for a play Sendak wrote- I say “constructed” because he of course had very specific drawings for her of what he wanted the characters to look like. It was a hilariously funny play, the costumes looked great, and, when she applied to grad school, he wrote her a letter of recommendation. A very kind thing to do for a young designer.
-- Nicole, Balloon Juice, comments

"Thinking" is another of those words that, in a user handle or site name, indicate precisely the opposite of their actual meaning.
-- ms_daisy_cutter, "Another case of internalized misogyny," ms_daisy_cutter's LJ

A system of morals can be found through reason, and should my reasoning be wrong, or a better way shown, then I can change it, and be an even better person.
-- Ben Pitawanakwat, "Why I am an atheist," Pharyngula

Old saying: give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.
New saying: They’ve given you an inch. Now how many miles are you prepared to take?
-- Ian MacDougall, Butterflies and Wheels, comments

For almost 20 years we’ve all been possessed by a powerful demon with an unpronounceable name: http
-- tfkreference, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Why do Unions support Republicans? I understand you can find gays icky and blacks scary, but neither blacks nor gays have created an orchestrated operation to gut your ability to earn, what you consider, a good living at a fair wage, unlike Republicans. At some level, you’d think blue-collar workers would realize the icky-scary feeling is just a feeling and feelings aren’t real in the tangible sense, whereas losing your job, benefits, or seeing your wage cut in half is real in the tangible sense and real in the tangible sense trumps feelings, in terms of importance.
-- gene108, Balloon Juice, comments

I must have missed it when the banksters and the paper capitalists apologized for their part in this and promised to pay their fair share and undertake austerity measures of their own.
-- BurntNjal, Guardian, comments

Being alive has never been and never will be the standard for receiving human rights.
-- Jeanette, Pandagon, comments

[H]ave you ever noticed that when someone like [obnoxious commenter] says “I’ll pray for you,” what they really means is, “I’ll pray for you to realize how wrong you are so that you can agree with me?”
-- Peaslepuff, Wakingupnow, comments

Atheists DO know the titles of hymns, believe it or not.

Sure. Thanks to Joe Hill.
-- Denice Walter and Narad, Respectful Insolence, comments

Mrs. Mitt seems like a nice enough person—she comes across as exponentially more human than her husband. Admittedly, that’s a low bar since anyone who seemed less human would be relegated to the cargo hold of a commercial airliner without a notarized document from an anthropologist.
-- Betty Cracker, “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again,” Balloon Juice

In 1975 my family (the job was my father's, the town was my Pueblo, Colorado, and the industry (as Steel) was one of the victims of the earliest leveraged buy-outs. If it weren't for government investment (i.e. Pork) and the CF&I pension trust fund, Pueblo would be a ghost town. My father was only 56, but he found being "let go" after 30 years and as a Managing Director who was, right before the buyout, being groomed for a Vice Presidency, so demoralizing that he never worked again. Here's the way I look at it: before the 1970's, the relationship between capitalists and their valued workers was a lot like a marriage. My dad thought he was married to his company. Now, it's like a rape. What do we want in this country? Rape capitalism, or Marriage capitalism. Why do we even need to ask?
-- Martimr, Conscience of a Liberal, comments

People who can’t handle the idea of not having strangers trust them by default probably shouldn’t be out in public anyway.
-- Forbidden Snowflake, Blag Hag, comments

Arizona--the Meth lab of democracy.
-- Beth, Respectful Insolence, comments

All this stuff about people’s appearances reminds me of a time I was trying to get a dude to leave my property, he refused and opted instead to insult my appearance, like I gave a shit. The most insulting horrible thing his tiny brain could conjure up was that he personally didn’t want to have sex with me, it was supposed to break my heart.
-- skeptifem, Pharyngula, comments

A friend of a friend is a LaRouchie. Definitely strange potatoes. She’s quite wealthy, wears furs all the time, sends her kids to some strange private school and always has an answer in any political discussion, usually a very peculiar one. Her answer is inevitably accompanied by a really annoying all-knowing smirk. She’s also not a nice person, at all, cold as ice, with a fake smile that freezes your blood. The LaRouche movement may have started off as a real political movement years ago, but now it is simply a cult. A very weird cult, to boot.
-- Svensker, Balloon Juice, comments

[S]ome quantity of [claims to Native ancestry] may be made by hopeful casino owners whose background contains a significantly larger percentage of Gambino or Bonanno than Mohawk. We should ask Ralph Reed or Jack Abramoff about this.

Yes, I recall the great Western legends of my childhood, such as the great warrior Running Numbers, and Chief Keeps His Mouth Shut.
-- Mortimer and Nom de Plume, Alicublog, comments

[O]n the 23rd, Ms Cupcake at Thinking Moms’ Revolution reported how difficult it is to force all of those supplements on her child and then, in a un-intended stroke of realism, described how her son says that he’s broken and cannot be fixed. Of course, she takes no credit for his low self-concept and pessimism- this is blamed on pharma and doctors just as autism itself is blamed on malfeasance rather than genetics or chance. They “stole his childhood”, she says.
-- Denice Walter, Respectful Insolence, comments [Some people genuinely hate the disabled. Some of them are our own parents. -- ?!]

Have you ever considered that telling an atheist that they have a God-shaped hole in their soul is like telling someone they have an astromech droid-shaped hole in their star fighter?”
-- DaveL, Pharyngula, comments

Posting asshole comments on twitter is like masturbating in front of the Jumbotron cameras. You might think you’re doing something private, but the 20,000 people watching you don’t see it that way.
-- Cris (without an H), Balloon Juice, comments

Have Americans become the modern Romans? Has the spectacle of the arena been safely moved to other peoples countries? Have the stone benches in the coliseum been traded for the comfort of a Barcalounger and a big-screen TV? Have we dehumanized victims to such a point that we can cheer their deaths, and honor the ‘heroes’ that slaughter them, despite their innocence? Is being something other than an American citizen a crime worthy of death?
-- Liam Fox, “Memorial Day Patriotism: Cannon Fodder for the Merchants of Death,” News Junkie Post

You think you're confused? Try being Scottish-Chinese, do you know how hard it is to eat haggis with chopsticks?
-- The Dark Avenger, Alicublog, comments

[S]omething like this deserves every profanity in the book.

Actually, I think we’ll have to make up brand new profanities to address it properly
-- Philip and JGC, Respectful Insolence, comments

they’re too Dunninged up the Kruger to have any kind of intellectual self-awareness.
-- BrianX, Pharyngula, comments

So then…we’re adding ‘The Jungle’ to the list of books meant as warnings that the GOP is taking as manuals?
-- The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptic

Every new form of personal identification will be considered the Mark of the Beast until proven to be only a harbinger of a newer, more sinister doom to follow. There will be no exceptions. In a thousand years when the government of Titan decides to organize the colonists using a system of color-coded hairpins, someone will hold aloft their Space Bible and say they told them so.
-- thesaucernews, More Words, Deeper Hole, comments

Being paid to wear a uniform does not justify murder. Murdering people in other countries does not make a hero. Sacrificing your life, or limb, for an unjust war does not make you a hero either; it makes you a victim. Convincing the youth that the invasion of other countries that never threatened or attacked their own, and the murder of innocent civilians, and all that dare resist, somehow equals patriotism, destroys the very fabric of society.
-- Liam Fox, “Memorial Day Patriotism: Cannon Fodder for the Merchants of Death,” News Junkie Post

[M]y mother got an extra 41 years and counting from her oncologist . . . whom she has outlived.
-- Pareidolius, Respectful Insolence, comments

Amazing that there are still people who believe that slavery was something that could somehow have been redeemed. Yeah, but then there are people who think that the president is an illegal alien, so I guess it shouldn’t take me aback…
-- Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.), Balloon Juice, comments

Be who you are, kids, not what society wants you to be.
-- Ajdeha, The God Article, comments

Whenever someone says "I'm not book smart, but I'm street smart," I hear, "I'm not real smart, but I'm imaginary smart."
-- He Was Mugged Just Seconds Later, Failbook

we of the unix system are already lost. Deus ex x11, et regexp, et ps axu|grep ‘soul’.
-- Homo Straminus, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the King will not leave the country in any circumstances whatsoever.
-- Elizabeth the Queen Mother, 1940, quoted in the Toronto Star

If it were up to me, I’d handle JP Morgan the same way parents handle children. You can’t follow the rules for handling deposits? Fine, you don’t get to take deposits any more. Oh, and you also lose your access to the Fed window, since that’s for people who are responsible with depositor’s money.
-- Ken, Balloon Juice, comments

My grandfather was a Jewish journalist in Nazi Germany. Through an amazing stroke of luck, he was on holiday in Switzerland when the entire paper was shut down and employees shipped off to concentration camps. His sister sent him a simple telegraph saying “don’t come back”, and although he managed to get his parents out, he never heard from her again.
-- Lexx Lee, “Why I am an atheist,” Pharyngula

All I know about India I got from Kipling, so I probably don’t really know anything about India.
-- grumpy1942, Pharyngula, comments

My husband's beautiful niece was told there was nothing more that could be done to stop her cancer, just as she came into a small inheritance. Instead of spending the money on painful, futile treatments, her husband chartered a plane and took her, her siblings and their spouses on one, last, live-it-up-til-you-die blowout vacation at their favorite Mexican resort. Perhaps it was a frivolous use of the money, but it left her family with cherished memories of that last, happy time together. For the comfort it gave her family, I think it was money well spent.
-- hoary puccoon, Respectful Insolence, comments

Even assholes find acorns. I think that is how the saying goes.
-- fish, Alicublog, comments

English is a wonderful language with tremendous capability for expression – maybe we ought to use it as though it is.
-- Chuck Butcher, Balloon Juice, comments