#corp

Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons. ↗

— Douglas Rushkoff

#data-mining #humanity #marketing #life

Have you thought this through? People die, love. I'm all for women, but this isn't a woman's game.' For some reason, this irritates me more than anythign else I've heard all day. It's not even relevant. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#love

My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#scorpio-races #water-horses #young-adult-fiction #horses

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted. ↗

— Robert Reich

#democracy #first-amendment #government #politics #public-assembly

Now play nicely, make-believe dead girl ↗

— Rachel Caine

#claire-danvers #eve-rosser #morganville-vampires #myrlin #morganville-vampires

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. ↗

— Eric Schlosser

#food

The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle") ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#corpse #dead #death #fear #horror

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody. He was. He was going to shake hands with death. He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been. ("3 Kills For 1") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#death #death-penalty #death-sentence #electric-chair #execution

In my world, people are always plotting. You have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every day. Like it was nothing. Or there’s a set of special rules for them. Remember when Bush made that whole speech about ‘corporate ethics’ last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or WorldCom is an aberration? It’s only the tip. Business is a religion. Probably the only one practiced all over the world. ↗

— Andrew Vachss

#business #corporate-greed #crime #enron #worldcom

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter... ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#history #incorporation #change