Rob Patrick > Rob's Quotes

“I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has. —JOHN TRUDELL”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics

“In the British case, some £133 billion had entered the economy since the mid-1970s, without anyone noticing, with £96 billion of that in the last decade. (The rate is accelerating, with current inflows totalling around a billion pounds a month.)”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back

“In an attempt to calm the storm, and in tribute to Cox, the Leave and Remain campaigns agreed to stop all campaign activities for three days, an extraordinary decision with only a week remaining until the vote. However, AIQ secretly continued deploying digital advertisements for Vote Leave, knowing that the British media would not be able to tell whether they were continuing online ads.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“played a recording of Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. ‘Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,’ said Oakes. ‘So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.’ Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“What Cambridge Analytica did was use complex corporate setups across jurisdictions not only to launder money but to launder something that was becoming just as valuable: your data.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“brilliant, passionate doctors who’ve had their reasons to stay bullied out of them by politicians.”
― Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

“To mark R-Day we’ll mint a commemorative ten-pound coin. My idea is for a mirror image of a clock.”
― Ian McEwan, The Cockroach

“Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia.”
― Ian McEwan, The Cockroach

“People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves,”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition

“Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing

“The DOE has a program to provide low-interest loans to companies to encourage risky corporate innovation in alternative energy and energy efficiency. The program became infamous when one of its borrowers, the solar energy company Solyndra, was unable to repay its loan, but, as a whole, since its inception in 2009, the program has turned a profit. And it has been demonstrably effective: it lent money to Tesla to build its factory in Fremont, California, when the private sector would not, for instance. Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina. One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed itself. It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane’s breakup. Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, DC, and New York City.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“he came to see there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration’s attitude toward public data. Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“By early 2019 Max was worrying aloud that he might not have enough nominees for his awards show, and that the ones he did get would all have the same story: how they kept the government alive even after the president tried to kill it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“I figured not having money was a small inconvenience for the priceless experiences that travelling by bicycle brought.”
― Ishbel Holmes, Me, My Bike and a Street Dog Called Lucy (Bradt Travel Guides

“And so I decided the best thing to do was ignore the fact it was impossible.”
― Ishbel Holmes, Me, My Bike and a Street Dog Called Lucy (Bradt Travel Guides

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“A certain amount of risk is inevitable, whatever we do, and I cheer myself up in difficult times with the statistic that most accidents happen in the home.”
― Anne Mustoe, Lone Traveller

“accepting lifts is cheating and I cycled on.”
― Anne Mustoe, Lone Traveller

“(I never confess to being a widow. Widows are thought to be unlucky in some societies, while in others, the local men get over-optimistic ideas.)”
― Anne Mustoe, Lone Traveller

“people who were more fluent at typing used their increased facility to be more polite, just as polite as they would have been while talking.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing

“Wall Street bonuses in 2015, when the economy was still healing from the crash of 2008, totaled $28.5 billion. That’s twice the total wages paid to every person in a minimum wage job in the US that year, which is around 3 million workers.”
― Eric Lonergan, Angrynomics

“Capital was protected – epitomized by the US insurance company, AIG, paying out hundreds of millions in bonuses in 2009 after being bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of $180 billion.”
― Eric Lonergan, Angrynomics

“SOON IT WILL BE SAID OF YOU WHAT IS NOW SAID OF US: THEY DIED! Macabre and trivial. And how people fight against returning to the planet the atoms they’ve borrowed.”
― Fernando Aramburu, Homeland

“He smoked a jade-inlaid vape made from the femur of a capybara and insisted on wearing only clothes that were Vantablack”
― Mark Leyner, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit

“It didn’t seem to matter much that the campaign had in fact broken the law in 2016. Pumping hundreds of thousands of pounds more than the legal limit into millions of Facebook adverts targeted at undecided voters was treated as an historical footnote, if it was mentioned at all.”
― Peter Geoghegan, Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

“We're living in a world in which we're all survived, targeted, herded, and indoctrinated to an unprecedented degree. Our fallen, debased state is ghastly. Our bodies have been transformed into profit-optimized enterprise zones, our minds have been hacked and neutered, our social milieus have been completely leached of authenticity....

[...]

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world -- high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to the situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud -- "I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing all the time -- negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive.”
― Mark Leyner