Simanek Obituary Quotes & Sayings

It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy. — P. J. O'Rourke

Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie - Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.63 (It means, literally, "normlessness.") We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. — Jonathan Haidt

They transfer the prison, and all of a sudden all this money cuts loose, all these people cut loose. — Janis Karpinski

What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs? — Francis Crick

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk. — David Pietrusza

I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me. — Tom Courtenay

[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia. — George Mason

Bard eyed him like he was manure on her shoes at the same time she did things, like sharpen a wooden stake, something she knew didn't work on him, but that was not her point, even if she was making one. — Kristen Ashley

I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long. — Edward W. Said

Reality is brutal or painful or frightening, but waiting is a distillate of fear that corrodes and dissolves. — Simon Mawer

And her hand kept remembering the sensation of the cloak against her fingers, replaying it over and over in her mind. There was a power to the feeling that compelled her thoughts to return to it, and to the song she'd heard / hadn't heard in a part of her mind and magic which now lay silent once more. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark. — Mario Batali