Dan > Dan 's Quotes

“Instead, people created their own house rules—rules that often made the game long and exhausting and gave rise to its reputation for being boring. In reality, when played according to its written rules, the typical Monopoly game lasts less than ninety minutes.”
― Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game

“Ah pulled some notes ootay ma poakit.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“It wis soon time fir us tae go. Johnny wis gabbin a load ay shite intae ma ear; things ah didnae want tae listen tae.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“People talk aboot youngsters and vandalism, what aboot the psychic vandalism caused by these auld bastards?”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“A couple of generations ago, a gathering like this would have been virtually unheard-of. Many landlords were part-timers: machinists or preachers or police officers who came to own property almost by accident (through inheritance, say) and saw real estate as a side gig.7 But the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.8 As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves primarily as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments. According to the Library of Congress, only three books offering apartment-management advice were published between 1951 and 1975. Between 1976 and 2014, the number rose to 215.9 Even if most landlords in a given city did not consider themselves “professionals,” housing had become a business.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line.8 At first, federal policymakers disagreed and at midcentury decided to fund the construction of massive public housing complexes. But real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration.9 Eventually, after America’s public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day. As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation’s largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as a “public-private partnership.” In real estate circles, they were known as “a win.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.18”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Those who profit from the current situation—and those indifferent to it—will say that the housing market should be left alone to regulate itself. They don’t really mean that. Exploitation within the housing market relies on government support. It is the government that legitimizes and defends landlords’ right to charge as much as they want; that subsidizes the construction of high-end apartments, bidding up rents and leaving the poor with even fewer options; that pays landlords when a family cannot, through onetime or ongoing housing assistance; that forcibly removes a family at landlords’ request by dispatching armed law enforcement officers; and that records and publicizes evictions, as a service to landlords and debt collection agencies.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“In prison I had become accustomed to one or two stimuli at a time: the book I was reading, the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway, the noises Josh was making on the other side of the cell. The free world is infinitely complex, and for a while it all came at me in a jumble. It was difficult for me to filter out what was important from the constant background noise of daily life. I also had to rebuild the mental capacity to make choices. After dreaming of food for two years, I found myself staring at menus, unable to decide what to eat, so I relied on other people to choose for me. I was constantly on edge, tense to the point of breaking. I sometimes had to leave crowded places suddenly. Other times I couldn’t handle the oppressive feeling of being in a room alone. I had nightmares nearly every night about being thrown back into prison.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“We have about eighty thousand people in solitary confinement in this country, more than anywhere in the world. In California’s Pelican Bay state prison alone, more than five hundred prisoners had spent at least a decade in the hole. Eighty-nine had been there for at least twenty years. One had been in solitary for forty-two years.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Even Japanese historians pronounced the Rabe finding important. Kasahara Tokushi, a professor of modern Chinese history at Utsunomiya University, testified to the Asahi Shimbun: “What makes this report significant is the fact that, not only was it compiled by a German, an ally of Japan, Rabe submitted the report to Hitler to make him aware of the atrocities occurring in Nanking. The fact that Rabe, who was a vice-president of the Nazi Party, entreated Hitler, the top leader of a Japanese ally, to intervene testifies to the tremendous scale of the massacre.”
― Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II

“When she finally concluded her research in 2015, the results were astounding: there were no significant differences in the development between children exposed to cocaine in utero and those who were not.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“Of course, Hurt and other physicians make it a point to caution against cocaine use during pregnancy. Its effects are similar to those of tobacco. It can raise the blood pressure of expectant mothers to dangerous levels and even cause a pregnant woman’s placenta to tear away from her uterine wall. For those reasons, it’s associated with premature birth.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“The New York Times editorial board has since officially acknowledged the paper’s role in “slandering the unborn.” It wrote, “News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized Black women ‘addicts’ by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“The myth of the crack baby was widely accepted as gospel, it seems, because it mapped so well onto existing ideas of Black biological inferiority and cultural pathology, and it stoked anxieties regarding violent crime and the cost of America’s social safety net. Indeed, in the form of the crack baby, America was delivered a perfect symbol for its animosity toward Black America—a ticking time bomb of violence and expense created because Black mothers cared too little about themselves and their offspring.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“What Webb could say with authority was exactly what the Kerry Committee had: that federal law-enforcement agencies, including the CIA, knew that Contra members were involved with the Colombian cartels and trafficking large shipments of cocaine to the United States. They also knew that a number of major U.S. drug rings controlled by Nicaraguan expats were helping to fund the Contras. Webb could have also said with authority that one of the Contra-cocaine connections known to the feds was Danilo Blandón, a trafficker who, it turned out, supplied Ricky Ross, the L.A. dealer who catalyzed the crack epidemic. Those were and are the facts.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“A smoking gun has yet to emerge proving a government conspiracy to poison communities of color using crack. But what the evidence supports is more insidious: the crack epidemic was the consequence of the anti-Blackness that permeated and continues to permeate every facet of American society and public policy. Reagan, the CIA, the cartels, and the Contras had no need to conspire, because the entire machinery of the United States was designed either to our detriment or with no regard for us at all. The crack epidemic was not the product of an anti-Black conspiracy but the product of an anti-Black system.”
― Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

“America’s a country with a state called Nuevo México. Other states are called Red, Snowy, Mountain, and Flowery; several of them were going to Flowery, and some of the others were going to Northern Caroline to see about making cigarettes. The state of Nuevo México even has a capital city called Holy Faith: Catholicism, New Mexico. And then there’s the hilarious Chi-Cago. (“Piss.” And, “I Shit.”) It’s funny until they feel the cold of winter.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“And now your jug is getting hot—your drinking water is starting to get as hot as coffee. The desert’s air, like you, is thirsty. It’s sucking up your sweat as fast as you can pump it, so fast that you don’t even know you’re sweating. But you’ve been walking across rough terrain for a couple of miles now, and you are breathing hard. The air comes to your lips and pulls water from you. Every breath dries out your nose, your sinuses, your mouth, your throat. Your tongue: you drink more hot water; your tongue, you take just one more gulp of hot water; your tongue. Desolation drinks you first in small sips, then in deep gulps.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Your spit turns to paste. Your mouth tastes nasty, so you take another little drink. You tell yourself you’ll only sip a couple more times, but to hell with it—you take a big pull off the bottle. Your lungs, now, are leaking moisture to the vampire air. Your tears leak into the sky—eyes dry and scratchy. The fluid in your lungs helps transport oxygen through the tissues into the blood. Less fluid, less oxygen. You breathe harder, you get drier.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“What they would do was to take the small intestine, squeeze out its contents onto the snow, cut it into small pieces, and eat it. The taste was strong and salty. One of them tried wrapping it around a bone and roasting it in the fire. Rotten flesh, which they tried later, tasted like cheese.”
― Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

“They also ate the blood clots which they found around the hearts of almost all the bodies. Their texture and taste were different from that of the flesh and fat, and by now they were sick to death of this staple diet. It was not just that their senses clamoured for different tastes; their bodies too cried out for those minerals of which they had for so long been deprived – above all, for salt.”
― Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

“The last discovery in their search for new tastes and new sources of food were the brains of the bodies which they had hitherto discarded. Canessa had told them that, while they might not be of particular nutritional value, they contained glucose which would give them energy; he had been the first to take a head, cut the skin across the forehead, pull back the scalp, and crack open the skull with the axe.”
― Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

“Dan had some questions about Chris-R. We all did. Why the name “Chris-R,” for instance? What’s with that hyphen? Tommy’s explanation: “He is gangster.” What about this drug business, which never comes up either before or after Chris-R’s only scene in the film? “We have big problem in society with the drugs. Chris-R is gangster and Denny takes drugs. So he must be rescued.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“The makeup chair was Tommy’s favorite place to learn his lines and he always insisted I stay near him when he was running them. Between sips of Red Bull, Tommy recited the first line of the first scene he wanted to shoot that day: “Oh, hi, Mark.” He did the line with different spins and emphases (“Oh, hi, Mark,” “Oh, hi, Mark,” “Oh, hi, Mark,” “OhhiMark”) until he was sure he had it.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Safowa had decided to dress Lisa in a sleeveless, backless, charmless, powerfully unfortunate red blouse.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Meanwhile, Tommy’s idea of directing an actress during auditions was to push her in front of a camera and emotionally terrorize her. “Your sister just became lesbian!” he’d say, and wait for the “acting” to kick in. If that didn’t work, he’d yell: “Your mother just die!” Every actress with confidence or a strong sense of self bailed. The few able to withstand Tommy’s attitude fled at the first mention that they’d have to lock lips with him.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“The Führer was heavenly, in his best mood and very gay.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“And so a friend of his—the lawyer Ralph Nader—began lobbying for mandatory seat-belt laws. Which was why General Motors hired prostitutes to follow Nader into stores—a Safeway supermarket and a pharmacy—to seduce and then blackmail him. “It happened twice,” Nader told me, when I telephoned him. “They were women in their mid-to-late twenties. They were pretty good. They both acted in a very spontaneous manner, not a furtive manner. They started a little small talk. Then they got down to it.” “What did they say to you?” I asked him. “The first woman said, ‘Would you help me move some furniture in my apartment?’ And the other one said, ‘We’re having a discussion on foreign affairs. Would you like to join it?’ Here I was, at the cookie counter!” Nader laughed. “‘Foreign affairs’!” he said. “And all because you wanted them to put seat belts in cars?” I said. “They didn’t want the government to tell them how to build their cars,” he replied. “They were very libertarian that way, to put it mildly. They had private detectives follow me everywhere. They spent ten thousand dollars just to find out if I had a driver’s license. If I didn’t have a driver’s license, they could have called me un-American, you see?” Eventually, General Motors was forced to admit the plot and apologize to Nader in a congressional hearing. The”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed