Bruce > Bruce's Quotes

“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Smoke-ccss-b85b07: Tell me about a time when you did something evil. ABlum: oh gee well sometimes i work too hard is that evil? Smoke-ccssb85b07: Sarcasm ignored. ABlum: ok um when i started college, my brother raph pressured me to join the ut austin chapter of his fraternity and i joined, only to discover that fraternities are the stupidest forms of social organization ever invented so, live and learn but at the end of the fall semester, one of my frat brothers offered to pay me to write his final history paper and i did it but i didn't want to get caught, so i read his earlier papers and put a lot of work into imitating his shitty writing which made the paper a d+ at best so he failed the class and i wouldn't give the money back so they made up an honor code violation and kicked me out of the frat and at the time i remember thinking "this has worked out surprisingly well" so, i don't know what you consider "evil" but i'm sure you can find it somewhere in there”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“Do human software games have directors?" said Tetsuo. "Like movies?" "Yeah," I said, "if they're real pretentious, like Weapon Eternal." "Af be Hui was the director of A Tower of Sand," said Tetsuo. "She became well-known. High-status. She made seven other games and her games changed history a little bit. I think we should play more of her work." "To what purpose? Did she finally get the Ip Shkoy to calm down about the Constellation?" Ashley wriggled violently and Tetsuo crawled off of her tail. "Purpose?" said Tetsuo. "What is purpose? History is not a trash compactor where you lost something important. You have to spend some time there.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“Historians and paleontologists have a great rivalry," said Tetsuo. "Most contact missions arrive too late, after history has ended. The people we wanted to contact have wiped themselves out. The historians have to put on pith helmets and learn how to dig up fossils." "But you're not fossils," said Ashley. "And so, the historians win!" said Tetsuo. "This time, the paleontologists have to learn about inefficient hierarchical systems of social organization!”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“They wanted us to change," said Tetsuo. "They came to our planet and they wouldn't shut up about fluid overlays and unhierarchical forms of social organization. We felt like we had to listen to them, because they were so powerful. But secretly we thought of them as monsters from space. And now here we are at your planet, and we are the monsters from space." "Why'd you come here? Why even bother?" "Don't you want to be a monster from space, too?”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Politicians are not born; they are excreted.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Lucius Cassius ille quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat identidem in causis quaerere solebat 'cui bono' fuisset.

The famous Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a very honest and wise judge, was in the habit of asking, time and again, 'To whose benefit?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“So it may well be believed that when I found him taking a complete holiday, with a vast supply of books at command, he had the air of indulging in a literary debauch, if the term may be applied to so honorable an occupation.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

... The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years