More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
News is news and spin is spin, and when you introduce the second to the first, what you have isn’t news anymore. Hey, presto, you’ve created opinion.
There was a war on, and the ones whose responsibility it was to inform us wouldn’t even admit that we were fighting it.
“I heard from a guy who knows a girl whose boyfriend’s best friend is in biotech that he—the best friend, I mean—ate some beef that was cloned in a clean room and didn’t have a viral colony, and it tasted just like teriyaki soy.”
They acted on a flawed assumption taken from an incomplete truth, and they screwed us all.
When we got to the afterlife, God could sort us out into the sinner and the saved. Until we got there, it seemed to him that we were better off just being good neighbors and reserving our moral judgments for ourselves.
They’re the sort who would rather we paved the world and shot the sick, instead of risking life being unpredictable and potentially risky.
There will always be people for whom hate is easier when it’s not backed up by anything but fear. And I will always do my best to hoist them by their own petards.
I see men and women like you and me, people trying to live their lives without making any mistakes that will come back to haunt them later. I don’t see sinners or people who have called down some sort of righteous plague. So stop. Stop trying to make people even more afraid than they already are by implying that, somehow, this is just a taste of the torments to come.
Mattel booth advertising Urban Survival Barbie, now with her own machete and blood testing unit.
“What glorious service may this unworthy one perform for her majesty on this hallowed afternoon?”
Sometimes, the hardest habit to break is the habit of doing nothing beyond the necessary.
From where I sit, there’s only one thing left that I can do, and that’s win. For the ideal they died supporting, and for the sake of their memories. So if I lose, if I have to go home empty-handed, if the next time I contact their families it’s to say, ‘Sorry, but I couldn’t make it after all’…
The difference between the truth and a lie is that both of them can hurt, but only one will take the time to heal you afterward.
We live in a world of our own creation. We’ve made our bed, ladies and gentlemen, whether we intended to or not. Now, we get the honor of lying down in it.
Sometimes in the news, “luck” is just a matter of “capitalizing on someone else’s pain.”
only way things could’ve gotten as bad as they did was if people were willing to take the first easy answer they could find and cling to it, rather than doing anything as complicated as actually thinking.”
“Give people something they can believe, especially something like a personal tragedy and a teenage girl being heroic to save her family, and not only will everyone believe it, everyone will want to believe it.”
So now that you’ve insulted our patriotism, our sanity, and our intelligence, how about we move on?”
“Everything is ‘just a story.’ Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, whatever, it’s just a story. What matters is making sure it’s heard.”
The trouble with the news is simple: People, especially ones on the ends of the power spectrum, like it when you’re afraid. The people who have the power want you scared. They want you walking around paralyzed by the notion that you could die at any moment. There’s always something to be afraid of. It used to be terrorists. Now it’s zombies.
The truth isn’t scary. Not when you understand it, not when you understand the repercussions of it, and not when you aren’t worried that something’s being kept from you. The truth is only scary when you think part of it might be missing. And those people? They like it when you’re scared. So they do their best to sit on the truth, to sensationalize the truth, to filter the truth in ways that make it something you can be afraid of.

