[Ryokan]

Written around 400 years ago and seems even more relevant today,

“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”

 

[BobG55]

“For our last number I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewellery.” -John Lennon (The Beatles at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London for the Royal Command Performance, Nov.4, 1963.)

 

[dougms3]

"Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose."

- "The Unkillable Soldier" Adrian Carton de Wiart

 

[dougms3]

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

- Michael Hopf

 

[Trihexagonal]

Die mother****er die mother****er die! -Dope

 

[Brandfuchs]

I don't make friends easily,
But the ones I do are for life

In fact, I came across this on greeting card inside the Laphroaig whiskey package.

 

[Philimon]

“usurpations … established only on a precarious and abusive right … having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without having grounds for complaint.”

- Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755)

 

[admiralnorman]

"The definition of an audiophile is 'someone who spends too much money on audio equipment.'" - Zeos

 

[Philimon]

… a deliberate policy of creating refugees wherever possible. An Army general … explained the idea to me as follows: “You’ve got to dry up the sea the guerrillas swim in — that’s the peasants — and the best way to do that is blast the hell out of their villages so they’ll come into our refugee camps. No villages, no guerrillas: simple.”

- the “mere gook rule” transcribed by R.W. Apple

 

[WorksUnit]

and a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world - Mikhail Bulgakov.

 

[Philimon]

"Apologists for state violence understand very well that the general public has no real stake in imperial conquest and domination. The public costs of empire may run high, whatever the gains to dominant social and economic groups. Therefore the public must be aroused by jingoist appeals, or at least kept disciplined and submissive, if American force is to be readily available for global management.
...
In short, there are ideologically permissible forms of opposition to imperial aggression. One may criticize the intellectual failures of planners, their moral failures, and even the generalized and abstract "will to exercise dominion" to which they have regrettably, but so understandably succumbed. But the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be "open" to the penetration and control of transnational corporations - that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse."

- Chomsky

 

[Ryokan]

In reality, states never repay their debt. They roll it over, meaning they defer repayment endlessly, paying only the interest on the loans. As long as they can keep doing this, they remain solvent. It helps to think of public debt as a hole in the ground next to a mountain representing the nation’s total income.

 

[joremita]

In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.
Mario Puzo