Tweeting

Tweeting is like sex. Writing a book is like raising a child.
--Jaron Lanier

Collectively

Are you aware that human beings cannot survive on their own? What has made our success as a species is the ability to work (dare I say it?) collectively toward basic common goals. Why the fuck is this simple fact presenting such a particularly huge problem to an extremist faction of the American political spectrum?
--Northen Soul

Money

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.
--George Carlin

Water

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
--W.H. Auden

Product

If you want to make the product that everyone else compares their product to, you have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don't know they want it yet.
--Jason Cross

Nation-State

Elite pundits increasingly seem to be making the argument that we simply can't afford to be a nation-state anymore--we can't afford to offer the most basic federal services to our poor and rural citizens. Yet they rarely consider how easily we manage to come up with unbelievable sums to remain an empire.
--Marcy Emptywheel

Obligations

It seems that we are having sometimes esoteric tiffs between Keynesians and Austrians about if and how governments should sustain jobs and growth. But, deep down, we are having a much more significant debate as we are being forced to redefine what we think about the rights and obligations of citizens and the State.
--George Magnus

Mental Illness

When are we going to recognize greed as a form of mental illness? A billionaire who wants more money is the moral and intellectual equivalent of a thousand-pound man who wants to gain weight.
--Silverback66

Fifty Percent

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
--Gore Vidal

Post-Englightenment

We live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.
--Neal Gabler

Science

We require a common culture in which science is an essential component. Otherwise we shall never see the possibilities, either for evil or good.
--C.P. Snow

Climate Change

There is extraordinarily little political will anywhere to do anything meaningful about climate change. It's time to recognize that we can't stop this train. The only thing we can do is prepare for the destination.
--Dr. Zachary Smith

Government

If you elect people who believe the government does not work, that government is always the problem, never part of the solution, they will work tirelessly to make their beliefs come true.
--Jared Bernstein

Corporations

Corporations are people, my friend....Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.
--Mitt Romney (Iowa, August 11, 2011)

Capital

The only sane conclusion is to open our eyes to the fact that finance capital is now bigger than the state. Sovereigns are limited by territory. Capital is not.
--Adam Haslett

Deny

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
--George Orwell

History

History doesn't repeat itself.

It echoes itself, it parodies itself, it shadows and foreshadows itself. Sometimes it mirrors itself, which is to say that it returns but with everything about it in reverse. It haunts itself--we can see ghosts flitting by but those ghosts have lost the power to affect life and besides they have business of their own. It resembles itself, the way grandchildren resemble their grandparents. That doesn't make them the same people though.
--Lance Mannion

Evidence-Based

As you well know there is a movement to teach and practice evidence-based medicine across the United States. Yet there seems to be no move to practice evidence-based economics.
--Meed Houston

Real Life

Money is something you should kind of watch from the corner of your eye while you live your real life.
--Laura Rowley

Twice

And here I sit so patiently,
waiting to find out what price
you have to pay to get out of
going though all these things twice.
--Bob Dylan

Advice

Milton Friedman believes that during a crisis, we only have a brief window of opportunity before society slips back into the "tyranny of the status quo," and that we need to use this opportunity or lose it. This is actually sound advice.
--Anders Behring Breivik

Organized

We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Not Knowing

I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
--Richard Feynman