“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception."

"A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing. The usual (and very vicious) nonsense preached on the subject of love claims that love is self-sacrifice. A man's self is his spirit. If one sacrifices his spirit, who or what is left to feel the love? True love is profoundly selfish, in the noblest meaning of the word — it is an expression of one's highest values. When a person is in love, he seeks his own happiness — and not his sacrifice to the loved one. And the loved one would be a monster if she wanted or expected such sacrifice. Any person who wants to live for others — for one sweetheart or for the whole of mankind — is a selfless nonentity. An independent "I" is a person who exists for his own sake." -- Love I that I be loved.

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born." -– Nikola Tesla, quoted in Thomas P. Hughes’s American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

'Morpheus: I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.'

"You'd rather sit in a surveillance van for days on end waiting to catch Tator handing Pee-Wee a vial? This, Detective, is what you're telling me?? A case like this here, where you show who gets paid behind all the tragedy and the fraud, where you show how the money routes itself – how we're all, all of us vested, all of us complicit... Baby, I could die happy."

“In order to have thoughts of kindness for the suffering of others, you have to have accepted your own suffering. In order to have empathy for others, we have to have empathy for ourselves. Because if we are avoiding our own suffering or the suffering we have experienced, then we will inevitably avoid the suffering of others. That which we reject in ourselves we inevitably reject in others.”

'Morpheus: Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.'

'Stefan Molyneux: "Thinkers who ignore childhood and its effects on the psyche, and then say they want to reform society, are exactly the same as communists or socialists who ignore the workings of the free-market and say they want to optimize economics – it can’t be done and it’s just a kind of scam."'

'Confucius believed that social disorder often stemmed from failure to perceive, understand, and deal with reality. Fundamentally, then, social disorder can stem from the failure to call things by their proper names, and his solution to this was the rectification of names. He gave an explanation to one of his disciples: "A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect." — Confucius.' -- "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." — Proverb

'The Oracle: We can never see past the choices we don't understand.'

"You really can't see any deeper into other people than you've seen into yourself." -- Stefan Molyneux

“The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings.” / “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” / “Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.”

'Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.' – John Naisbitt

"Once you get that self-bullying doesn't work, you know that violence doesn't work, you know that to your very core." -- Stefan Molyneux

Comment: David: From the book "The Practice of Self-Responsibility" in Nathaniel Branden's book "The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem" -- 'Some years ago, in my group therapy room, we hung on the wall a number of sayings that I often found useful in the course of my work. A client made me a gift of several of these sayings done in needlepoint, each with its own frame. One of these was "It isn't what they think; it's what you know." Another was "No one is coming." One day a group member with a sense of humor challenged me about "No one is coming." "Nathaniel, it's not true," he said. "You came." "Correct," I admitted, "but I came to say that no one is coming."'

'SOCRATES: Antiphon, I find selling one’s beauty or wisdom a foul deed. Because, if one sells his beauty to whoever wants it, then we call him a prostitute, but if one meets somebody who is beautiful in body and soul and befriends him, then we call him a wise man. This is exactly what happens with wisdom. The ones selling it to those who want it are called Sophists. Whoever, though, understands that somebody is clever and teaches him something good and makes him a friend, we believe that he is a good and virtuous citizen.'

'Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.' – Charles Mackay

'...by giving men the right to vote themselves special privileges and redistributed wealth from the pockets of their neighbors—by making democracy "an end in itself" [it] leads to what Alexis de Tocqueville warned it would [become]—the tyranny of the majority—in which the power of government "covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men's will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd." -- This is not what America's republican form of democracy was meant to be.'

'"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship." — Alexander Fraser Tytler / "The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster ... lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion ... that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow." — H.L. Mencken / "[The man usually chosen as leader in a democracy is] someone bold and unscrupulous...who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's property." — Cicero / "[An] elective despotism was not the government we fought for." — Thomas Jefferson

"Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that." -- Erich Heller

'The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.' -- George Orwell

'Big Brother is watching you.' -- George Orwell

'People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.' -- George Orwell

'Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.' -- George Orwell

'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' -- George Orwell

'In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.' -- George Orwell

'Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.' -- George Orwell

'Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.' -- George Orwell

'So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.' -- George Orwell

'The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.' -- George Orwell

'We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.' -- George Orwell

'There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.' -- George Orwell

'Liberal: a power worshipper without power.' -- George Orwell

'We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.' -- George Orwell

'"Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice." (William Lloyd Garrison) -- Gradualism in theory indeed undercuts the goal itself by conceding that it must take second or third place to other non- or antilibertarian considerations. For a preference for gradualism implies that these other considerations are more important than liberty. -- Cleaving to principle means something more than holding high and not contradicting the ultimate libertarian ideal. It also means striving to achieve that ultimate goal as rapidly as is physically possible. In short, the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them? If libertarians refuse to hold aloft the banner of the pure principle, of the ultimate goal, who will? The answer is no one.'

'"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages." — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments pt i, ch iii (1759).' -- Mozart's 'Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor' inside.

"It's hard to get enough of something that almost works." -- Food, Drugs, Religion, Money, Status, Power, 'Leaders' promising 'solutions', Taxes, Violence, War

"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun."

"A man must have a code."

Moore: "The *idea* of the god *is* the god."

"No good deed goes unpunished."

Comment: Illya Kuryakin: 'If I may quote Admiral William Adama: "There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."

'"Crisis? What crisis?" - incorrectly attributed to James Callaghan by The Sun newspaper.' -- "I don't think other people in the world would share the view there is mounting chaos." - Jim Callaghan's actual words. -- Same piss, new bottle.

'There is some hope that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive […] [T]he feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world […] frightens me much more than bombs." — George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell

"Make your life purposeful while you've got it."

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

"The difference between truth and fiction: fiction has to make sense." -- Mark Twain

McLuhan on Twitter: "That one big gossip column that is unforgiveable, unforgettable, and for which there is no redemption, no erasure, no mistakes. Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness. Time has ceased. Space has vanished. We now live in a global village. The simultaneous happening; we're back in acoustic space. We've begun and again to structure the primordal feeling, the tribal emotions, from which a few centuries of literacy had divorced us. The tribalising process, the inner trip, the depth involvement in the experience of the unified human family, that is something of which we've had no experience for a many centuries. It is a process that is located so entirely in the present that it does not appear in the rearview mirror to which we habitually look for reassurance and nostalgic orientation. At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective." —McLuhan 1967

"Art is anything you can get away with." — The medium is the message (1967)

"The Internet is the new kind of awareness. It's not something that you look at. It is the way or means through which you look at things." — Eric McLuhan

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write; they will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." — Alvin Toffler

'"There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know." - This statement was made at a press briefing given by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 12 2002. -- Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek extrapolates from these three categories a fourth, the unknown known, that which we don't know or intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values.' -- "What you don't know you know controls you but you don't control it." (The Reality of the Virtual, Zizek)

Charles Jencks in 'The Language of Post-Moern Architecture, 1976': "Happily, we can date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time. Unlike the death of a person, which is becoming a complex affair of brain waves versus heartbeats, Modern Architecture went out with a bang... Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalised, mutilated and defaced by its black inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom."

'A quick definition of “black-boxing” by Bruno Latour (in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies): a process by which: “scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.“'

"Carles adopts an alterego diametrically opposed to the persona he has created for lingustical-philosophical-cultural space of HRO in an effort to problematize the identity that has been constructed therein and which perhaps has begun to deconstruct his subjectivity outside of the delineations of that space. Though Carles writes HRO, there is clearly a sense that it has begun to write him... The audience is blamed for the commercialization of expression, as if the terms of any kind of communication exchange have been ineradicably infected by commercial exchange, which no structures all efforts at reciprocity. The pseudo-Carles challenges the notion of creative consumption and derides a culture transfixed with surfaces... by adopting this new persona, Carles tries to demonstrate the manner in which identity itself is surface." -- dutr

"there’s more to life than trying to make your personal brand into a commodity. stop standing on the sidelines of life and actually LIVE. get off the internet. you are all afraid to live your life. you want it to mean something, but at the same time, you want every one else to feel more trivial than your life. you just want to sit there and gawkerfy everything. like i said, i am deeply disturbed by today’s internet culture and the trends amongst the latest generation. every thing is like a mirror and every one just wants to reflect. they waste time on their bullshit myspaces posting photos and creating themselves. it’s just fucking bullshit. waste of time. you spend so much time thinking about who you are that you don’t even become someone. needless to say, with sites like this promoting that, this world is headed down the shitter. of course kids are gonna makes mistakes, but not if they are told that it is okay to make mistakes and that it is cool to act like a dumbfuck all the time."

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Hehe.

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." -- Charles Mackay

"The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is."

"Dog Carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'Save us!' And I'll look down, and whisper 'no.' They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day's work for a day's pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers, and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say."

Gordon Gekko: "Money itself isn't lost or made it's simply transferred from one perception to another, like magic."

"I have to be leaving now, but I won't let that come between us. OK?"

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." --"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." -- "Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

Donald Knuth: "Rather than trying to stay on top of things, I am trying to get to the bottom of things."

Quotation from Lucas Conley 'Obsessive Branding Disorder': "Branding offers the satisfaction of a sense of change without the hard work. Executives feel good because, technically, it’s still innovation – surface innovation. Meanwhile, image is easier and less expensive to work with than products or services."

"You can’t go and ask your customers to be your inventors. That’s your job."

Arthur C. Clarke on the 'Ultimate Machine': "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing -- absolutely nothing -- except switch itself off."

"I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves."

David Chalmers: “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”

"seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things."

"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."

"I did not understand sufficiently that Advertising is directed to people who would like to live at least somewhat like the Leisure Class, and that if you want to succeed in Advertising you must -- as adman David Olgilvy wrote – believe in the products and lifestyle sought by the Leisure Class. I did not sufficiently believe in most of the products, or attendant lifestyle being offered then by people in Advertising. I was going to that meeting, in 1973, talking about believing in ecology."

“To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” (L. Peter Deutsch)

'Alan Kay: “The ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.”'

"Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking." Silence.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook: “I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do. That’s just, like, not the point.”

"Failure is our most important product." - Robert W. Johnson, Founder, Johnson & Johnson

"When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost - and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl." - T.S. Eliot