Michael E Winkler > Michael E's Quotes

“What is important here is cash. [A] leader needs money, gold and diamonds to run his hundred castles, feed his thousand women, buy cars for the millions of boot-lickers under his heels, reinforce the loyal military forces and still have enough change left to deposit into his numbered Swiss accounts.”
― Mobutu Sese Seko, Voices of Zaire: Rhetoric or Reality

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise

“Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be viewed as an existence not only without
wars… but also without [the government] telling us how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“We need to create a crisis to get consensus in order to bring about change.”
― T.H. Bell, Excellence

“I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.
”
― Flannery O’Connor

“Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati: Down to Earth v. 2 of Robert Anton Wilson 2nd (second) Revised Edition on 01 January 1991

“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.”
― John Pilger

“American involvement in the Persian Gulf has not been in order to secure energy supplies for the United States, but instead to supply energy for its energy-starved Bretton Woods partners in Europe and Asia. Put more directly, the Americans do not protect the Persian Gulf kingdoms and emirates so that the Americans can use Middle Eastern oil, but so that their Bretton Woods partners in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Pakistan can.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize.”
― Kevin Alfred Strom

“the land is warming more rapidly than the ocean surface, and the high latitudes near the poles are warming faster than the lower latitudes near the equator. More generally, the coldest temperatures (at night, during the winter, and so on) are rising more rapidly than the warmest temperatures—the climate is getting milder as the globe is getting warmer.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The bottom line is that the science says that most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influences on the climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“This is class warfare by elites on the working class, in which the elites try to hide the way they have benefited from skyrocketing inequality by portraying themselves as more virtuous than those on the other side of the tracks, and thus more worthy of their good fortune. Call it COVID Calvinism: you aren’t simply lucky that your job allowed you to stay home or could never possibly be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English; you are more virtuous, and therefore justified in perpetuating the yawning gulf between yourself and the workers. You then use allegations of racism or sexism or transphobia to hide the class divide from which you are benefiting. Woke politics, in other words, is a smokescreen that obscures the realities of class.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“Newspaper prestige, not always but usually, is a function of liberal estimation. Most intellectuals are liberal, and editorial prestige depends on what intellectuals judge it to be.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
― Arthur Sheekman

“To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about," and "I built my career on negative reviews”
― John Waters

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Open your mind before your mouth”
― Aristophanes

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery,”
― Dante Alegro