Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. 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.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
John Stuart Mill
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
Mark Twain
Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
The Public is merely a multiplied "me."
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Winston Churchill
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
Otto Von Bismarck
When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring.
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
Be polite; write diplomatically ;even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
Voltaire
A witty saying proves nothing.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
Karl Marx
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Louisiana voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment Saturday banning same-sex marriages and civil unions, one of up to 12 such measures on the ballot around the country this year.
I can't help but find this sort of thing humorous these days because they're already too late. What I mean by that is best stated in a post I did back in JUly of 2003 on an article in the NY Times about groups threatening a state by state fight on the subject:
Beware the Evil of Social Consciousness
...and how it perverts the natural order of things...
The New York Times has an article called "Adversaries on Gay Rights Vow State-by-State Fight" which describes the probablility that since the recent decision by the Supreme Court in the Lawrence vs Texas case which overturned a Texas anti-sodomy law there will be a galvanizing of resistance by the right wing to the idea of gay marriage not seen since Roe vs Wade.
Probably true...after all, nothing cuts quite so close to the bone, (as it were), of what really is core to the bullshit of American religiosity and cultural identity than the collective "sneer at the queer". Nearly all Americans are trained in this precept from the get go...boys learn to tell queer jokes before they even know what a queer is...and many queer kids tell queer jokes even after they realize they are one...the practical alternative being of course a fast or slow, social or literal suicide. Isn't the peer pressure thing just the greatest tool ever for indoctrination? I don't know how we would be able to fuck kids up quite so badly without it.
Trouble is though, that like all comfortable and seemingly self-evident hatreds, it eventually becomes less and less possible to reconcile day to day reality with the cliches and icons that serve as insulation against having to be rational about such things. Nothing is quite so frustrating as knowing full well that you despise something and yet cannot come up with a good reason to despise it. The best thing to do in that case is to do what Americans are expert at; ignore the facts and wave a flag or a bible in the air and continue with the reliable old fantasy that "consensus makes right".. Like it or lump it...love it or leave it...you've heard the tune.
That sort of works...for a while.
But all too soon we find ourselves having to reach for the remote more frequently because for some reason those we despise seem to be getting way too much air time. Worse we start finding ourselves having to pretend to be tolerant in public toward those we despise because locals no longer own the company we work for and the production line or office has queers we can't avoid working next to. And, like all repetitive behavior, we become inured to it so that we don't notice that we are less vigilant and tense about being in the same room with "those kind". We will ask, "Now, how did that happen?", should we become aware of it.
It doesn't matter, but a few cases of beer and/or card games later we've just about got the whole plot figured out...if its not the Jewish controlled media then its government mind control experiments gone haywire....or even the Commies...pick a demon, any demon, the sophistication level is irrelevant.
A cartoonish simplification, I know, but there's truth to it. The weapon used is empathy and the perpetrator is called social consciousness. The M.O. is to keep whispering the same idea over and over and to move so slowly that no one notices until its too late. By the time you are shouting past the police lines that you will never allow the changes being demanded, its over. The change has already taken place. That's where we are today with the gay marriage issue. The very fact that it is an issue being entertained in the media and in the highest courts in the land and argued about by plain folk in their day to day is what makes legalization of gay marriage inevitable...its just semantics now.
Social consciousness has a relentless evolution that sometimes seems almost independent of the species that harbors it. And it operates at the largest scale, across centuries and diverse cultures, always plodding seemingly forward toward some teleological goal of perfect social harmony. It cannot be resisted: The success of US civil rights movement of blacks taken against the backdrop of the deep committment and historical momentum of the South to preserve its biases at all costs, were no match for the impetus of social change required or demanded by this "thing" I am calling social consciousness.
With that perspective I see the end result of this impending state by state battle being the same as the tulmult over Roe and Wade; great gnashing of teeth, snarled threats, police line crashing, queer bashing and media cashing in. The hand in the bucket will be vigorously roiling the water around and everyone will be drawn to the spectacle of the great splashes...and then the hand will be withdrawn and the water will return to its usual state. A decade or two later young people (and some older) wondering what the huge fuss was about and how could people be so ignorant "back then". Gays will have been married and divorced in every state and some other group of social outcasts will be painting up signs for their protest parade on the weekend while their adversaries are handing out leaflets declaring the natural order of things is at stake.
"Netpolitik is a new style of diplomacy that seeks to exploit the powerful capabilities of the Internet to shape politics, culture, values, and personal identity. But unlike Realpolitik — which seeks to advance a nation’s political interests through amoral coercion — Netpolitik traffics in “softer” issues such as moral legitimacy, culturalidentity, societal values, and public perception." - The Rise of Netpolitik
PUN-DIT (n) : A learned man; a teacher; a source of opinion; a critic: a political pundit.
