Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons this war was launched in the first place. But they were not. They crop up only occasionally, as asides. The main reason given for banning drugs184—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people. It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.”
― Anonymous

“bailiff.”
― Anonymous

“DMX Death Threats Gun Death: 35, Generic Threat: 20, Beat Up to Death: 6, Non-Gun Weapon: 5, Robbery Death: 2, Death by Truth: 1 “Niggas wanna lie/Then niggas wonder why/Niggas wanna die” There are 69 death threats on DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot”
― Shea Serrano, The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed

“In spouse, I mostly hear “S.mouse,” the name of Chris Lilley’s blackface teenage rapper in Angry Boys. And”
― Augusten Burroughs, Lust & Wonder

“Thanks to Rwanda’s lack of minerals, the world’s most powerful nation was content to let 800,000 people have their faces chopped off with machetes.”
― Nathan Robinson, Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America

“it guarantees a minimum annual income to every citizen, on the assumption that there’s no way to calculate a justifiable relation between hours worked and dollars earned.”
― James Livingston, No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea

“In the month that followed the intolerable events in Charlottesville, America’s six top broadsheet newspapers ran twenty-eight opinion pieces condemning anti-fascist action, but only twenty-seven condemning neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Trump’s failure to disavow them.”
― Natasha Lennard, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life

“Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, “How can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?”
― Natasha Lennard, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life

“The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it doesn’t feel like that at all. We don’t feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to.”1”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“I wanted a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not. The sort of job where there was no chance of a genteel old lady with more time on her hands than she knew how to deal with showing up out of the blue and saying, ‘You look so tired!’ and ‘We’re counting on you!’ Above anything else, I wanted a job I could do alone. I knew that I’d need to leave that stipulation behind me at some point, but at least for the moment, that was how I felt.”
― Kikuko Tsumura, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

“Photos extend our existence, since they can live on after our deaths like poems or mummy masks.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty