I Am

I am, plus my circumstances.
--Jose Ortega y Gasset

Outside Eden

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
--Mark Twain

Journalism

The entire point of journalism--the very thing that distinguishes it from the closely related fields of fiction and public relations--is that it presents the public with things that are true. They don't necessarily have to be important truths, of course, but they need, at minimum, to not be anti-truths, falsehoods fostered by a corporation that takes in $70 billion every year in service of selling a good no one needs and no one should want.
--Tim Marchman

Nature

What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
--Rebecca Solnit

Mixed Feelings

American pop culture leaves little room for mixed feelings, thereby inciting mixed feelings every step of the way.
--Heather Havrilesky

Excellent

I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.
--Jerry Seinfeld (acceptance speech for Clio award, October 2014)

Capitalism

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
--Walter Benjamin

Long Enough

Like anything else, you do it long enough, you will take it for granted, or there will be aspects of it that are grinding.
--Jon Stewart

Everything

You need to write everything and then take out as much as you can so that what's left really pings. I can't explain why that works, but it sometimes works in performance as well.
--Emma Thompson

Buildings

When we deal with buildings we deal with decisions taken long ago for remote reasons.
--Stewart Brand

Vulnerability

In any complex person, there's a combination of vulnerability and strength, and it's those people who show their vulnerability that are the strongest.
--Edoardo Ponti

Imaginary

All the different methods by which societies in history classified people into a hierarchy of groups have been based on imaginary stories. They do not reflect objective reality.
--Yuval Noah Harari

Intolerance

Intolerance may be as old as religion itself.
--Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama)

Transformation

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
--Rebecca Solnit

Exist

Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?
Because it exists.
--Leo Tolstoy

Capitalism

The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.
--Simone Weil

Empathy

The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness, rather than as a marker of civilization.
--Nicholas Kristof

Libertarian

Being a libertarian is wedded to an epistemological humility that proceeds from the assumption that we don't know as much as we think we do, and so you have to be really cautious about policies that seek to completely reshape the world. It's better to run trials and experiments.
--Nick Gillespie

Anticipating

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
--John Maynard Keynes