Not going to do anything real fancy here. No images, no gifs, no videos, no joke saved for the end of the thread. Just want an old fashioned collection of quotes that I’ve built up here and there over the years. Some are from famed authors, poets, and speakers. Others are just from simple bloggers and website commentators who will probably never be as popular, but their words are still just as meaningful.
We all want to progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
— C.S. Lewis
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
— Thomas Paine
A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.
— Winston Churchill
America will never be destroyed from the outside, if we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
— Abraham Lincoln
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
— Voltaire
It annoys me to see merit being jettisoned in favor of political correctness.
— Computing Forever
…we do well to recall that political correctness does not acknowledge limitation and does not lend itself to the reasonable resolution of the grievances that it champions. On the contrary, the very notion of reasonableness and even that of reason comes under its attack (the West’s “white male hegemony”). The concept of victimization that it validates is not relative and defined with regard to a just order. It is absolute and defined relative to an unattainable ideal. Thus, it legitimates a war against everything that exists and even everything that could exist, all of which will always fall intolerably short and deserve to be destroyed. Ultimately, its spirit is nihilistic.
— Howard S. Schwartz
“There’s nothing more boring than somebody who has ever only looked at evidence that only supports his or her own conclusions. Look at the contrary evidence, and that will breed, I think, a very important and virtuous humility.”
“The answers are obvious, but political correctness prevents us from talking about them.”
“Political correctness is an attack on any knowledge that would serve to curb state power.”
“One of the most terrible things about multiculturalism is you rarely get to discuss ideas. Instead you just inflame identities.”
“Don’t blame low birthrates for mass immigration – in an age of increasing automation, you need fewer people.
Don’t blame the victim: the goal of mass immigration is cultural destruction.”
— Stefan Molyneux
Here’s the danger in identity politics. The more we mix up the personal and the political, the more we define ourselves and our entire worldview according to what colour or sex or sexuality we are, the more we will experience every criticism of our beliefs as an attack on our very being, our personhood, our right to exist. If your politics are indistinguishable from your self–your biological, racial, sexual self–then every challenge to your politics will naturally look like an assault on your self, on you as an individual. This is why identitarians describe even measured debate about their political beliefs as “erasure” or even “violence”: because having made politics all about them and their mental wellbeing. Identity politics directly breeds thin-skinnedness and intolerance. And in green-lighting such fragile narcissism, it green-lights violence too. After all, if political disagreement really does threaten your very existence, if critical speech really is violence, how should you deal with it? By censoring it, or even crushing it, by any means necessary, to protect your precious self.
— Brendan O’Neill
If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior.
— Paul Joseph Watson
If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.
— Voltaire Kevin Alfred Strom
Women are born with a natural power. It’s something that men don’t and will never have. It’s called femininity. Feminists want to strip this power away from women because feminists find femininity offensive. They find it offensive because men love feminine women. Feminists also hate masculinity because feminists find it offensive for women to love masculinity.
— intheshitter
Part of the power fantasy is being sexy. Prohibiting female characters from being sexualized is OPPRESSIVE. Period.
–@MelonieMac
A long life has taught me that a man may seem weak where women and children are concerned and yet be anything but a weakling in the sterner avenues of life.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, from The Martian Tales: Gods of Mars
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
— G. Michael Hopf
Tribalism is nature. If you force incompatible groups together and introduce laws to silence people’s right to protest about it, the resentment you cause will find other ways to express itself.
— WayOfTheWorld
Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
― Jean Racine
In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.
Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
— Frank Herbert
I just need to say, that I am grossly offended that some game devs think I can’t enjoy a game unless the player character is like myself, female. Literally my absolute fav game is Witcher 3. A game in which I play one of the most manly men in gaming history; tough, badass, brutal when necessary, unbelievably caring and emotional at times, a loving father, passionate lover, and yes banger of women and seducer at times. But oh well, I don’t have a Witcher cock myself so clearly I’m not going to enjoy that game. Fuckin’ piss OFF you particular game devs. I can play ANYONE, ANYTIME and love it because I”m not PLAYING ME!!!!!!!! Gah. *mutters in the corner*
— Danielle Dovahsdottir
An SJW doesn’t seek escapism from their media though, they seek the emotional gratification via ego validation. This is why they write up their stories where the focus of the story isn’t what’s over the next metaphorical hill, but rather their self insert character receiving a “Validation Bukkakee” from all the characters around them. & why they need their characters to reflect both their own identity & their own ideology.
— XIIIthHARBINGER
Same here. It’s incredibly insulting to think I can’t relate to someone who isn’t the same sex as me, which comes off as pretty damn sexist. They’re so condescending and we didn’t have these problems years ago until they came in trying to force their own politics in. Nobody cared if a character was a woman, black, or whatever until they showed up.
— red walrus
They aren’t content to be acknowledged as a fan of Star Wars or Anime or Comics or Gaming. They have to be acknowledged as an LGBT fan, or a female fan, or a minority fan. The division by IDENTITY arises not from the community excluding them, but by their instance that their fandom be defined by their personal identity first.
If you want to be accepted as a gamer, or a comics fan, or a retrocomputing enthusiast, stop calling yourself a GAY gamer, a female retrocomputing enthusiast, a black comics fan. Just be a fan. We’re all just fans, until you start adding something in front of YOUR fandom that identifies you as different than me because of skin color or genitalia or sexual identity or preference. I didn’t do that. you did.
— Donovan Colbert
Gamers are competitive, hard core, by nature. We love a challenge. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challenge us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
— Ssilversmith
For gamers to whom strategy and tactics form the essence of any game, two things primarily characterize a game: how one wins and what players do on a turn. The former dictates strategy and the latter dictates tactics. Any aspects of a game which do not meaningfully contribute to one or the other aspect of a game are superfluous and detract from the game; they are merely distractions.
–Moshe Callen (whac3)
One thing I noticed, is that many of the “nerd” hobbies and interests have reached a critical mass in terms of popularity and accessibility due to the financial benefits to the companies making them. This was great at first, but it lost it’s niche appeal and is now catering to the lowest common denominator. This has even happened with video games, sci-fi TV shows…also heard this happened with other things like Magic: The Gathering. Not sure what the future holds at this point.
— rotoninja
Popularity of almost anything results in the destruction of what made it interesting, different or unusual.
— scrumsey
Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt.
— Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse Dune
Why do SJWs want to be “represented” on screen? Because they want to watch themselves on screen.
This is no different from the mythical Narcissus who wanted to gaze at his own reflection in the pool.
— Itchy
It’s sad how stories of brotherhood and friendship are inevitably perverted and sexualized in today’s world. Two guys are close friends? Gay innuendo is shoved in to pander a certain crowd.
— Alexrd
Lack of LGBT representation? Actually, I’m sick and tired of having LGBT representation and mixed marriages rammed down our throats via tv commercials, shows, and news media feature stories. It’s a bombardment of this propoganda. It seems they aim to promote more people to do and be the same. You would think that the whole world practices such!
— Carlos Cruz
I know I’m long outside the target demographic of film and television, now. But I haven’t watched a television show on a regular basis since Seinfeld (with the exception of the first two seasons of “House”), and I haven’t been to a blockbuster film since Return of the King in 2003. It seems to me, that a THICK BLACK LINE is being drawn in the culture, between the present generation, and anyone born before 1980.
When I was young, cultural continuity was a key feature of film and television. Some of my favorite cartoons were Woody Woodpecker and Tom & Jerry. TV shows of my father’s generation were something my brothers and I loved to watch on Sunday mornings: The Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, Charlie Chan. As we got a little older, we looked for TV and movies that respected that tradition. Not necessarily DUPLICATED it, but borrowed the best bits from it, in creating something totally new for our generation. The Western revival of the late eighties is a good example of this. Then, of course, is the original Star Wars films, which are a total homage to the WWII genre, Tom Mix, and Buck Rogers.
Today, it’s all about body-snatching the past, not building on it. Murder the heroes of the previous generation, then re-animate them on screen with zombie bromides plugged into them. Or, even worse, unearth the buried corpses of the past generation, and desecrate them on screen, in order to prove a point. It’s like this generation has more hatred for what came before, than it has any hope at all about what could come next. It’s profoundly sad and terrifying.
— Greg Gauthier
But enjoying a flawed movie and calling a movie flawless are two completely different things.
— YourMovieSucksDOTorg
Now you all know about “fast food.” This is a “fast movie.” And what is a fast movie? A fast movie is a movie that made to open quickly, make some money, and be forgotten. A week later, you’re hungry for another movie. There is nothing in this movie to challenge the imagination of anyone who sees it, or make them more curious about human nature, or surprise them, or delight them, or entertain them, or even scare them. It simply delivers a bare minimum of shocks and thrills and would-be violence and alleged terror. And… it’s like when fast food came along, it made some people forget what real food tasted like. And fast movies, I’m afraid, are making people forget real movies. With the fast food you don’t have to chew real hard, and with fast movies you don’t have to think, not hardly at all.
— Roger Ebert
She had tried to escape her own thoughts by staring at the holofilms she had been supplied with and watching, with moderate curiosity, the images flickering and capering on the projection surface, as the adventure story (all were adventure stories) hastened from event to event with little time left for conversation and none for thought — or enjoyment, either. Very like their furniture.
— Isaac Asimov, quote from Robots and Empire
But being there was a reminder that TV is ultimately important; it’s one thing that can unite us all when we’re at our most divided, and the best TV show can appeal to everyone subtly enough that the audience might not actually realize how much they have in common with the others who watch it.
— Tyler Coates
Cinema is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world.
Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce cinema, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Film is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.
It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. Film is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
Film criticism is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which cinema is the halo.
— Michael Haneke
I never cared if you were “gay” until you started shoving it in my face, and the faces of my children.
I never cared what color you were, until you started blaming my race for your problems.
I never cared about your political affiliation until you started to condemn me for mine.
I never cared where you were born until you wanted to erase my history and blame my ancestors for your current problems.
I never cared if you were well-off or poor, until you said you were discriminated against, when I was promoted because I worked harder.
I never cared if your beliefs were different from mine, until you said my beliefs were wrong.
NOW I CARE!
My patience and tolerance are gone.
I’m not alone in feeling this way, there are millions of us who do……and we have had enough!
— Anonymous
Those who howled at me weren’t expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.
–Liel Leibovitz
When you become well trained at self censoring, you’ll struggle to know what it is you stand for. You then become easy to sway and manipulate, because your sense of self is not rooted in solid principles that keep you in integrity.
The opinions and beliefs of ‘the group’ become yours. Said group decides what your belief system should look like and how it should operate. In this state, you’ll find yourself regurgitating that which has been deemed acceptable, whilst steering clear of anything that might cause you to be rejected.
— Africa Brooke
There is a principal which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principal is contempt prior to investigation.
— Herbert Spencer
seriously, like 90% of being smart is knowing when to accept criticism
— Anonymous
I can’t tell you how many times I have had to remind people of the paradigm of knowledge which states that the less you know of a subject, the more inclined you are to think you know it all and be loud and opinionated on the subject whereas paradoxically, the more you know of a subject, the more inclined you are to realise just how little you know and to shut up and listen and learn.
— Botties
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.”
— Thomas Sowell
American life is defined by the struggle to earn enough money to move away from diversity. Our entire country – suburbs, long commutes, private schools, zoning battles – is built around the need to avoid diversity and actually live in a recognizably American community.
— James Kirkpatrick
Let me summarize what I was trying to say at the very end of the video here. The progressive ideology is all about taking away and tearing down others in the name of “equality”, it does not care about the individual. In this interview JJ is straight up using women as a shield to deflect (as well as misrepresent) any criticism that is being leveled at the film. He claims to be defending and advocating for minorities all the while ignoring as well as hurting the smallest minority on the planet, the individual. People should be judged based off of who they are and what they can do, not what they are. People are attacking the terrible characters in TLJ based off of who they are and what they do, JJ is defending them based off of what they are. He lumps people into groups instead of treating them as people. To alter Ayn Rand, those who deny the individual cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
[…]
Whether you agree with feminism and social justice or don’t is irrelevant. They are ideologies, political ones at that. And they are not above criticism or scrutiny.
— BOOFIRE191
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
— Voltaire
Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.
— J. R. R Tolkien
One of the most visible signs of decay in the old Reich was the slow decline of the cultural level. [By culture, I mean that which may] be regarded as inimical to a truly elevated standard of thinking and living.
[…]
Sixty years ago, an exhibition of so-called Dadaistic ‘experiences’ would have been an absolutely preposterous idea. The organizers of such an exhibition would then have been tossed into a madhouse, whereas today they are appointed presidents of art societies. At that time, such a plague would never have been allowed to spread. Public opinion wouldn’t have tolerated it, and the government wouldn’t have remained silent; for it is the duty of a government to save its people from being stampeded into such intellectual madness.
[…]
Here everything seems to have passed the peak of its excellence and is now rushing toward the abyss.
[…]
[T]hese precautions had to be taken in regard to institutions whose main purpose should have been to promote the education of the youth, and not merely to provide entertainment for sophisticated adults.
[…]
The more vile and miserable are the men and products, the more they will hate and denigrate the ideal achievements of former generations. What these people would like best is to completely destroy every vestige of the past, so that, by excluding the standard of comparison, their own kitsch could be looked upon as ‘art.’
[…]
[T]his memory alone is the standard whereby our own works are properly appreciated. Only those who have nothing of value to give to the world, but would rather give it God-knows-what, will hate everything that already exists, and would like to negate or destroy it completely.
[… T]he desire to pawn off their kitsch as great and original achievements leads them into a blind hatred of the superior work of the past.
[…]
[They] will use all means to evade criticism of their own acts.
[…] One has good grounds to be suspicious of any new idea, any doctrine, any new worldview, or any political or economical movement, that tries to deny everything that the past has produced, or to present it as inferior and worthless. In general, the reason for such hatred is either its own inferiority or an evil intention. Any renovation that’s truly beneficial to human progress will always have to begin its constructive work where the last stones have been laid. It need not be ashamed of using those pre-existing truths. All of human culture, as well as man himself, is only the result of one long line of development, where each generation has contributed but one stone to the building of the whole structure. The meaning and purpose of revolutions cannot be to tear down the whole building, but to take away that which is bad or unsuitable, and to continue building on the space that has been laid bare.
Thus alone is it possible to talk of human progress. Otherwise the world would never be free of chaos, since each generation would feel entitled to reject the past and to destroy all its works, as the necessary prerequisite to any new work of its own.
[…]
[The so-called intellectuals] shirked the duty of resisting the poisoning of the healthy instincts of our people. They left it to the people themselves to deal with this impudent nonsense. Lest they be considered as understanding nothing of art, the people accepted every mockery of art, until they finally lost the power to judge what is truly good or bad. All in all, there were plenty of signs that times were getting very bad.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 10
Edit (5-7-2022): Added quotes from Isaac Asimov and Adolf Hitler.
Edit (6-4-2022): Added quote from James Kirkpatrick.
The Anomalous Host 