Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
-Edward Snowden, 2015
Tag: Quotes
Flags Are Bits of Colored Cloth
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
-Arundhati Roy, Come September, Speech, September 29, 2002
A Truly Great Library
“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”
–Jo Godwin
Fallacies Do Not Cease To Be Fallacies
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
–G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, April 19, 1930
Philip K. Dick on Reality
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978
The first time I saw this quote, I thought it was likely fake. In other settings and times, Dick was no fan of reality. In 1980, for example, he wrote,
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards, I’m out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That’s what science fiction is all about.
John Wheeler on Ignorance
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
-John Wheeler, Scientific American, 1992.