Enso > Enso's Quotes

“What keeps a person passive and compliant,” he explained, “is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear.”
― Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

“Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn’t good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards.”
― Jonathan L. Howard, The Fear Institute

“Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. “I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens,” says Ingrid LaFleur, an art curator and Afrofuturist.”
― Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture

“Half-baked ideas that might seem too big even for the naïfs at TED Conferences—that Woodstock of the intellectual effete—sit rather comfortably on Silicon Valley’s business plans.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“In amassing zero-day exploits for the government to use in attacks, instead of passing the information about holes to vendors to be fixed, the government has put critical-infrastructure owners and computer users in the United States at risk of attack from criminal hackers, corporate spies, and foreign intelligence agencies who no doubt will discover and use the same vulnerabilities for their own operations.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“But withholding information about vulnerabilities in US systems so that they can be exploited in foreign ones creates a schism in the government that pits agencies that hoard and exploit zero days against those, like the Department of Homeland Security, that are supposed to help secure and protect US critical infrastructure and government systems.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“Organized crime is nothing more than capitalism with the mask of respectability removed. —Dave Mazza”
― J.D. Chandler, Portland on the Take: Mid-Century Crime Bosses, Civic Corruption and Forgotten Murders

“Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other’s gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters.”
― Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” notes a retired FBI agent, Max Noel. “People don’t want to listen to that. They can’t believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”
― Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

“We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn’t make magic carpets work.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“At my local big-box bookstore, the gun nut, muscle head, and martial arts magazines are all shelved together in what I call the “masculine anxiety” section.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“And go to San Francisco! It’s one of the twelve most interesting cities in the world. California has immense contrasts—the utmost wealth and the most hideous squalor. But there’s beauty and interest everywhere.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“The central idea of this book is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity. The self isn’t something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“Albert Einstein once said, “a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
― Michael Taft, The Mindful Geek: Mindfulness Meditation for Secular Skeptics

“Many centuries after the Buddha, the Chinese Chan (Zen) patriarch Yunmen (c. 860–949) was asked: “What are the teachings of an entire lifetime?” Yunmen replied: “An appropriate statement.”6 For Yunmen, what counts is whether your words and deeds are an appropriate response to the situation at hand, not whether they accord with an abstract truth.”
― Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age

“It is not society itself that the Epicurean recoils from; it is this society of unceasing struggle for more and more.”
― Luke Slattery, Reclaiming Epicurus: Penguin Special

“Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated,’ said the philosopher of the Garden. ‘For just as there is no use for a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of the body, so there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the sickness of the soul.”
― Luke Slattery, Reclaiming Epicurus: Penguin Special

“The super-hero is something that I think people struggle to make intensely apolitical. But it cannot help but be political, because the classical role of the super-hero is constantly to return to the status quo. The super-hero cannot help but be a figure for conservatism.”
― Patrick Meaney, Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews

“If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth

“Civil war is an exercise in building group loyalties. The trauma of civil war and massacre works not just to desocialize the victims but to socialize the killers into a particular ethical and political stance. Men who had killed together were bound together.”
― Richard Alston, Rome's Revolution: Death of the Republic and Birth of the Empire

“Any [artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.” —IAN MCDONALD, River of Gods It”
― Nick Cole, CTRL ALT Revolt!

“Rather than seek God—the goal of the brahmins—Gotama suggested that you turn your attention to what is most far from God: the anguish and pain of life on this earth. In a contingent world, change and suffering are inevitable. Just look at what happens here: creatures are constantly being born, falling ill, growing old, and dying. These are the unavoidable facts of our existence. As contingent beings, we do not survive. And”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“For a while I hoped that Buddhism Without Beliefs might stimulate more public debate and inquiry among Buddhists about these issues, but this did not happen. Instead, it revealed a fault line in the nascent Western Buddhist community between traditionalists, for whom such doctrines are non-negotiable truths, and liberals, like myself, who tend to see them more as contingent products of historical circumstance.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Our old religious and moral traditions,” writes Cupitt in The Great Questions of Life (2005), “have faded away, and nothing can resuscitate them. That is why a tiny handful of us are not liberal, but radical, theologians. We say that the new culture is so different from anything that existed in the past that religion has to be completely reinvented. Unfortunately, the new style of religious thinking that we are trying to introduce is so queer and so new that most people have great difficulty in recognizing it as religion at all.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“If there is a general law of urban criminality here, it’s that cities get the types of crime their design calls for.”
― Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City

“The simplest answer is that the user had access to reality—every company builds a bubble around itself, where the products get built and tested in a more controlled environment than they get used in. This is especially true of complex software. What the early users enabled Xiaomi to see was how MIUI actually worked when real (albeit unusually technically proficient) people tried to install it on a wide variety of devices.”
― Clay Shirky, Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

“Makery-ness in the U.S. comes as part of a complex of oppositional attitudes toward mainstream culture that is more about social signaling than unvarnished commitment to DIY. The Maker Movement involves ostentatiously DIY products, designed and assembled against a background of nostalgia for the old U.S. manufacturing industry, often produced in small batches for connoisseurs of the handmade, created as a form of conspicuous production. Meanwhile,”
― Clay Shirky, Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream

“Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier.”
― Clay Shirky, Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream

“Que bonito es el mundo; Lastima es que yo me muera.” “How beautiful is the world; It’s a pity that I must die.”
― William Carlsen, Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya

“Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid. In”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future