Michael Bernstein > Michael's Quotes

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
― William Gibson, Idoru

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“The formula was the same formula we see in every election: Republicans demonize government, sixties-style activism, and foreigners. Democrats demonize corporations, greed, and the right-wing rabble. Both candidates were selling the public a storyline that had nothing to do with the truth. Gas prices were going up for reasons completely unconnected to the causes these candidates were talking about. What really happened was that Wall Street had opened a new table in its casino. The new gaming table was called commodity index investing. And when it became the hottest new game in town, America suddenly got a very painful lesson in the glorious possibilities of taxation without representation. Wall Street turned gas prices into a gaming table, and when they hit a hot streak we ended up making exorbitant involuntary payments for a commodity that one simply cannot live without. Wall Street gambled, you paid the big number, and what they ended up doing with some of that money you lost is the most amazing thing of all. They got America—you, me, Priscilla Carillo, Robert Lukens—to pawn itself to pay for the gas they forced us to buy in the first place. Pawn its bridges, highways, and airports. Literally sell our sovereign territory. It was a scam of almost breathtaking beauty, if you’re inclined to appreciate that sort of thing.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“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

“People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.”
― Richard M. Stallman

“When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.”
― Richard M. Stallman

“With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.”
― Richard M. Stallman