Doug > Doug's Quotes

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it, which was true.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“I'm up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.”
― Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“The fact that wristwatches weren’t invented yet made it difficult to look impatient, but he managed.”
― Scott Meyer, Off to Be the Wizard

“Martin wasn’t totally awake, but not totally asleep either. He was in that hazy, semiconscious state where the dreams of the night before dovetail with the reality of the day ahead. That time where you find yourself thinking how unfortunate it is that your lower half has been replaced with the body of a crab, and how difficult it will be to explain to your boss that you couldn’t come in to work because your pants are now impractical.”
― Scott Meyer, Off to Be the Wizard

“He tried to come up with a word that meant “witch,” that didn’t have any insulting or demeaning overtones. He couldn’t. In fact, after some thought, he couldn’t think of a word that meant female that men hadn’t imbued with some belittling shade of meaning. Finally, after a much longer silence than he had intended, he simply said, “I can understand why.”
― Scott Meyer, Off to Be the Wizard

“The only bright point was when we stopped off at that fish market they got here before we went to the airport.” “Oh,” Jimmy said brightly, “the one where they throw those great big fish around?” “Yeah, that’s the one,” Agent Miller said, wearily. “How was it?” Jimmy asked. “It was a fish market. You’ve been to a fish market, haven’t you, Jimmy? It was exactly like that, only crowded, and with guys yelling and throwing around a big dead fish. Does that sound like fun, Jimmy? How they ever convinced people that that’s a tourist attraction is beyond me. It’s all a big sham. I’m pretty sure they kept throwing the same fish around no matter what anyone ordered.”
― Scott Meyer, Spell or High Water

“Gwen decided it was time to speak up. “Tell me, has any woman ever laughed when you made the obvious joke?” “No,” Sid said, “but that’s just because women don’t really have a sense of humor.” Gwen asked, “What makes you say that?” Sid said, “I tell a lot of jokes, jokes my male friends think are hilarious, but women almost never laugh.” Brit nodded, and said, “Well, we can’t argue with that. Your logic is as strong as your wit.” Sid bowed more deeply, and said, “Thank you.”
― Scott Meyer, Spell or High Water

“For a smart person to argue with a dumb person, they have to dumb down their logic on the fly, while the dumb person thinks in dumb logic naturally, giving them an advantage.”
― Scott Meyer, Spell or High Water

“Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.”
― Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind

“As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“According to a 2006 study, 90 percent of China’s billionaires (calculated in Chinese yuan) are the children of Communist Party officials. Roughly twenty-nine hundred of these party scions—known as “the princelings”—control $260 billion.54 It is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. Today, this collaborative arrangement can be seen in the way that foreign multinational media and technology companies help the Chinese state to spy on its citizens, and to make sure that when students do Web searches on phrases like “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” or even “democracy,” no documents turn up. “The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events,” writes Wang Hui, “but rather of state interference and violence.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“This book is less a sequel to my last one and more a collection of bizarre essays and conversations and confused thoughts stuck together by spilled boxed wine and the frustrated tears of baffled editors who have no choice but to accept my belief that it’s perfectly acceptable to make up something if you need a word that doesn’t already exist, and that punctuation is really more of a suggestion than a law.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“When life gives you lemons you should freeze them and use them to throw at your enemies using some sort of trebuchet.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place”
― Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You

“In an age when news travels so fast around the world, our sense of community and our concern for those far away from us have grown enormously. In the early twentieth century, feelings of nationalism were very strong, while awareness of our entire humanity was quite weak. In those days people were less aware of what was happening in other regions or other continents. But now, with global media transmitting news at such speed, we have a deeper awareness of the interconnectedness of people everywhere. Together with this, people’s concern for humanity as a whole, and their recognition of the value of basic human rights, seem to be deepening as well. To me, this trend is a source of great optimism about the future.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World

“The law isn’t supposed to be about unspoken excuses and behind-the-scenes calculations. The beauty of the system is that judges and juries are allowed to consider only what is seen and heard in open court. In between the white lines of this arena, it’s all supposed to make sense. This is where we all get to be equal again. In the defendant’s chair, rich and poor ride the same roller coaster, face the same music. Case has to match case. Sentence should match sentence. But they don’t match anymore. They probably never did, and probably it was never even close.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

“The thing is, there’s generally no consequence for bad police behavior, even repeated or serially bad behavior. Even if individual officers are successfully sued, the only thing that happens is that the city’s corporation counsel pays out some cash, and life just goes on as before. An officer’s record of complaints or settlements isn’t listed publicly. A defense lawyer who wants to find out if the officer who arrested his client has ever, say, bounced an old lady’s head off a sidewalk or lied to a judge about witnessing a drug sale has to meet an extraordinary legal standard to get access to that info.

In order to look at an officer’s record, you have to file what’s called a “Gissendanner motion,” the term referring to a 1979 case, People v. Gissendanner. In that case, a woman in the Rochester suburb of Irondequoit was busted in a sting cocaine sale by a pair of undercover police. The court in that case held that the defendant isn’t entitled to subpoena the records of arresting officers willy-nilly, but that you needed a “factual predicate” to look for records of, say, excessive force or entrapment. In other words, you already need to know what you’re looking for before you find it.

What this all boils down to is, if you really feel like it, you can definitely sue the New York City Police Department. Since so much of what they do happens on the street, in front of witnesses, you might very well even win. But even if you win, there’s not necessarily any consequence. The corporation counsel’s office doesn’t call up senior police officials after lawsuits and say, “Hey, you’ve got to get rid of these three meatheads in the Seventy-Eighth Precinct we keep paying out settlements for.” In fact, when there are successful lawsuits, individual officers typically aren’t even informed of it.

What makes this so luridly fascinating is that this system is the exact inverse of the no-jail, all-settlement system of justice that governs too-big-to-fail companies like HSBC. Big banks get caught committing crimes, at worst they pay a big fine. Instead of going to jail, a check gets written, and it comes out of the pockets of shareholders, not the individuals responsible.

Here it’s the same thing. Police make bad arrests, a settlement comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket, but the officer himself never even hears about it. He doesn’t have to pay a dime. And life goes on as before.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

“Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

“This book is not about bad people. It is about all of us.”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class