Steve > Steve's Quotes

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“The bottom line remains the same: you’re either awake or you’re not.One day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles.”
― Jed McKenna

“of the Hill Country realized we were there to stay, their attitude towards us softened; they started to talk to me in a different way. I began to hear the details they had not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me—and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before—stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed: stories about a very unusual young man, a very brilliant young man, a very ambitious, unscrupulous and quite ruthless person, disliked and even despised, and, by people who knew him especially well, even beginning to be feared.”
― Robert A. Caro, Working

“It had to do with that something in me, that something in my nature, which, as I said earlier, wasn’t a quality I could be proud of or could take credit for. It wasn’t something that, as I missed yet another deadline by months or years, I could take the blame for, either. It was just part of me, like it or not; the part of me that had hated writing an article for Newsday while I still had questions—or even a question—left to ask; the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be”
― Robert A. Caro, Working

“complete; the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that, even as I thought of them, I felt it was crucial to head down. It wasn’t something about which, I had learned the hard way, I had a choice; in reality I had no choice at all. In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts—through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing—can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time. But that’s a logical way of justifying”
― Robert A. Caro, Working

“that quality in me. And I know it wasn’t only logic that made me think: I’m never going to write about a crucial election, a pivotal moment in my subject’s life, and say that no one’s ever going to know if it was really stolen or not until I’ve done everything I can think of to find out if it was stolen or not.”
― Robert A. Caro, Working

“These groups learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“First, the Delta regime of inequality is not the result of too little capitalism, too little development. Second, in many ways the entire United States is rapidly becoming the “Delta writ large”:”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“many of the human and material extremes that were the keys to the Delta’s identity either as the “South’s south,” or “America’s Ethiopia” were shaped not by its isolation but by pervasive global and national influences and consistent with interaction with a federal government whose policies often confirmed the Delta’s inequities and reinforced its anachronistic social and political order as well … the social polarization that is synonymous with the Mississippi Delta may be observed wherever and whenever the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power overwhelms the ideals of equality, justice and compassion and reduces the American dream to a self-indulgent fantasy. As socioeconomic disparity and indifference to human suffering become increasingly prominent features of American life, it seems reasonable to inquire whether the same economic, political, and emotional forces that helped to forge and sustain the Delta’s image as the South writ small may one day transform an entire nation into the Delta writ large.16”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“The blues emerge immediately after the overthrow of Reconstruction. During this period, unmediated African American voices were routinely silenced through the imposition of a new regime of censorship based on exile, assassination and massacre. The blues became an alternative form of communication, analysis, moral intervention, observation, celebration for a new generation that had witnessed slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in rapid succession between 1860 and 1875. Perhaps no other generation of a single ethnic group in the United States, except for Native Americans, witnessed such a tremendous tragedy in such a short period of time. Performer Cash McCall described the blues as the almost magical uncorking of the censored histories of countless people, places and events: Well, in the old days, you see, you weren’t allowed to express your feelings all that much. A lot of stuff was bottled up inside. Coming up from the old days until now … You can’t explain it in a conversation so the best way to do it is to sing.33 On the other hand, guitarist Willie Foster described them as the irrepressible voice of daily anguish: The black folks got the blues from working … You work all day long, you come home sometimes you didn’t have”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“The socially totalizing aspects of plantation production enabled the planter bloc in Mississippi to build a modern police state on top of slavery using all-encompassing laws and a minutely detailed pass system that renders the concept “Orwellian” completely feeble.53”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“Therefore, for social, political, and production reasons, the leadership of this capitalist complex fought to expand. The plantation system was not dying a slow death due to land exhaustion, rather it was struggling to expand and conquer. By the 1850s, cotton demand, production, and profitability had reached unprecedented heights. So much wealth was generated that key elements within the colonization-minded Mississippi wing of the Southern plantation bloc felt they would be better served by organizing their own nation.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“To rectify this situation, planters organized the General Levee Board in 1858. This body was dedicated to constructing 262 miles of levees from Memphis to Vicksburg at a cost of $6.25 million. Although only 142 miles were completed prior to the Civil War, the projected increase in property values by the year 1868 was put at $150 million. One of the world’s largest public works projects, the levee system was, and is, one of the defining features of Delta capitalism.57”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“In 1848, Alexis de Toqueville attempted to describe the origins of this regional imperialism: Those Americans who go out far away from the Atlantic Ocean, plunging into the West, are adventurers impatient of any sort of yoke, greedy for wealth, and often outcasts from the states in which they were born. They arrive in the depths of the wilderness without knowing one another. There is nothing of tradition, family feeling, or example to restrain them, laws have little sway over them, and mores still less. Therefore, the men who are continually pouring in to increase the population of the Mississippi Valley are in every respect inferior to the Americans living within the former limits of the Union. Nevertheless, they already have great influence over its counsels, and they are taking their place in the government of public affairs before they have learned to rule themselves … [When a state has a population of 2 million and is one quarter the size of France] it feels itself strong, and if it continues to want union as something useful to its well-being, it no longer regards it as necessary to its existence, it can do without it, and although consenting to remain united, it soon wants to be preponderant.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“In December 1863, Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction guaranteed the re-establishment of regional planter hegemony. It allowed repentant planters and their newfound Northern partners, typically investors and army officers, to reclaim confiscated land. In the Lower Mississippi Valley this new alliance would later come to defeat every attempt by African Americans to occupy or lease land, to regulate and raise wages, or to improve living and working conditions.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“General Hawkins, administrator of the Northeast Louisiana Delta, objected to the preservation of land monopolies and believed that the failure to break up plantations into small farms would have a devastating impact on the future Southern society. Additionally, he viewed the lessees as men who cared nothing how much flesh they worked off the Negro provided it was converted into good cotton at seventy five cents per pound … Cotton closed their eyes to justice just as it did in the case of the former slave master.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“One of the most important lessons to be learned from Delta history is the relationship between representation, social control, and taxation. Democrat organizations such as the White Men’s Clubs and the Taxpayer League grew rapidly. The latter was composed of planters who accused the Reconstruction governments of mismanagement when they were not complaining about the cost of governmental services, high taxes, and the state debt. They wanted social service monies redirected to levee construction and the retirement of their own back taxes. One traveler found that at every town and village, at every station on the railroads and rural neighborhood in the country, he heard Governor Ames and the Republican Party denounced for oppressions, robberies and dishonesty as proved by the fearful rate of taxation. White Leaguers knew … that they must appeal to the world as wretched downtrodden and impoverished people.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“Orwellian language points to weakness—Orwellian weakness. When you hear Orwellian language, note where it is, because it is a guide to where they are vulnerable. They do not use it everywhere. It is very important to notice this and use their weakness to your advantage.”
― George Lakoff, The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

“Parsani's manuscript evoked a feverish excitement in Hyperstition's laboratory as the discovery of these notes on the cross of Akht — an artifact whose 'decimal gates* opened onto an inorganic pestilence, recovered from a forsaken perpetuity, or the 'Ancient Without Tradition’ — coincided with one of Hyperstition's theoretico-fictional projects. This project explored nexuses between numeracy. Tellurian dynamics, warmachines and petropolitics, models for grasping war-as-a-machine and monotheistic apocalypticism, all in connection with the Middle East. The project had been temporarily halted for lack of what may be called 'technical elements for the fictional side': what was missing was some vehicle for transporting the theoretical carriers in their expedition, a narrative line with the appropriate authority to mobilize the fictional side of the project.”
― Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

“Moreover, Parsani's breakthrough was coincidental with an ongoing discus- sion at Hyperstition's laboratory crisscrossing between the Deleuze-Guattarian model of the ’war machine* and desert-nomadism. The discussion was spiralling through a series of theoretical confrontations between jungle militarism (the Vietnam war or the process of NAMification) and desert-militarism (War-on- Terror and Mecca-nomics). The discussion at Hyperstition ultimately developed into what would later be defined as 'biobjectivity', or the logics of petropolitical undercurrents. According to a blobjective point of view, petropolitical undercurrents function as narrative lubes: they interconnect inconsistencies, anomalies or what we might simply call the ‘plot holes' in narratives of planetary formations”
― Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

“and activities. To this extent, petropolitical undercurrents run through terrestrial decoding machines, conspiracies, polytics and Tellurian dynamics — or what, in Gilles Deleuze and F6tix Guattari's somewhat aestheticist and conservative appropriation, is known as the New Earth (on the basis of what calendar, according to which planetary reference, is this New Earth announced?) A blobjective view necessarily diverges from the Earth as a whole towards an entirely different entity, an earth under the process of 'Eradication*, as it was called in Hyperstition's laboratory. Eradication as a process spreads out in at least three directions: (1) the leveling of all planetary erections (idols?), or the attainment of a burning immanence with the Sun (the solar outside) and the burning core of the”
― Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

“For someone with ADHD, any given task takes much more energy than it takes for others. To shower, get dressed, and get out the door in the morning can require the amount of care and concentration that other people expend over their entire day. To set up a maintainable system for those with ADHD, we must first eliminate all those systems that are inefficient, unwieldy, and cumbersome and replace them with systems that are streamlined, fast, and convenient. The best organizational system for someone with ADHD is the one that is most efficient, streamlined, most convenient, and the fastest/easiest to maintain, because it requires the fewest number of steps and materials married to the smallest amount of effort and labor.”
― Susan C. Pinsky, Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD, 3rd Edition: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized

“The best organizational system for someone with ADHD is the one that is most efficient, streamlined, most convenient, and the fastest/easiest to maintain, because it requires the fewest number of steps and materials. To set up a maintainable system, we must first eliminate systems that are too inefficient, unwieldy, and tedious and replace them with systems that are streamlined, fast, and convenient. Often these systems sacrifice beauty for efficiency.”
― Susan C. Pinsky, Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD, 3rd Edition: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized

“Part of the reason fantasy is so reviled, I think, is because it gives us this idea that the world is more than what we’re given, that it can be anything, that the rough material of work and hard going is not the whole substance of this universe. Dreamers don’t make good workers. So you teach them that no matter how miserable, what they’ve got is the best, and the Other is terror and lies. Well, to be bold, fuck that.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Indistinguishable from Magic