Prosthetic Conscience

Reworking a slogan

Anarchy is the radical notion that other people are not your property.
– Roderick Long

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Inspiring quote

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” – Thomas Paine

Facts on the ground? Politics of the possible? @#$! ‘em.

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Marcus Aurelius on Cooperation

We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.

– Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

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Conspiracy

“If the government doesn’t trust the people, why doesn’t it dissolve them and elect new people?”

— Berthold Brecht

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When in Rome

When in Rome, burn it.

— GCU Arbitrary, The State of the Art, Iain M. Banks

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From the Enchiridion

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
— Epictetus, translated by George Long

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Kevin Phillips On Decay

“Decay” always has two faces: the one displaying economic and social polarization and injustice, which always stirs complaint among progressives, and the second representing moral and cultural decadence-cum-sophistication, which invariably stirs conservative and fundamentalist outrage

— Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy

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Pratchett on The Conflict of Civilizations

“The conflict is not between Christianity and Islam or between East and West - instead, it is between stupid people and other stupid people.” - Terry Pratchett

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Wendell Berry on industrial farming

“Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

– Wendell Berry, on the Washington Monthly Comment Forum

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Ambrose Bierce on Land

LAND, n. A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

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Malcom X on self-defence

“Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” — Malcom X

This quote was included in an audio-montage of quotes and music behind the closing credits of V for Vendetta. Many more Malcom X quotes are here.

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Scarygoround quote

“You can’t be arrested for things that are too weird for there to be laws about!”
— Esther de Groot, Scary Go Round

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Merton on salvation

“To be saved is to fall into the ludicrous and satanic flippancy of false piety, kitsch.”
– Trappist monk Thomas Merton

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Pride and Prejudice

“Perhaps,” said Darcy, “I should have judged better, had I sought an introduction; but I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers.”

“Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?” said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. “Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?”

“I can answer your question,” said Fitzwilliam, “without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.”

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,” said Darcy, “of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.”

“My fingers,” said Elizabeth, “do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault–because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman’s of superior execution.”

Darcy smiled and said, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.”

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Mark Twain

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

— Mark Twain

I especially like the coinage of “revolute.”

And here’s another:

(I used to be) a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific …Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? … I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.

But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.

It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

— Mark Twain (1900, two years after the Spanish-American war began)

Le plus ça change, le plus le meme chose.

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Thomas Jefferson

“Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distin- guishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under government wherein the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our States in a great one. 3. Under government of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence in these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it… . It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject…. But even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to public affairs. I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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Four D’s

“There are four D’s which I never refuse: A Dinner, A Duel, A Drink and A fair Dame!”

— Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890)

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Another sword quote

“In a serious encounter it is not of necessity our wish to take our opponent’s life, but first secure our own safety, and then to terminate the combat in our own favour by disabling him, and I cannot imagine a more thoroughly disabling stroke than six inches of cold steel through the sword hand.”

— Alfred Hutton “Cold Steel”

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Buckminster Fuller

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model which makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Buckminster Fuller

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Lincoln on labour

[…]labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior – greatly the superior – of capital.

— Abraham Lincoln, 1859

The whole speech is here. It’s an interesting speech, in which he argues that wage labour is not exploitative, because most people are neither employers nor employees, and most wage labourers do not stay wage labourers their whole lives. That might have even been true in Lincoln’s time, but it’s certainly not true today! It’s also worth noting that his main point was to contrast free labour with chattel slavery.

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