#pit

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication). ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#death #philosophy #death

I know the problem of obesity. I got to tell you, I think that's tepid. I just don't think the bully pulpit is going to be enough to sufficiently fight obesity. We're going to have to have incentives in here. ↗

— Max Baucus

#enough #fight #going #got #here

The ornaments of your home are the people who smile upon entering time and time again. ↗

— Maralee McKee

#guests #hospitality #hosts #manners #home

Percy?" Annabeth gripped his arm. "Oh, bad," he muttered. "Bad. Bad." He looked across the table at Frank and Hazel. "You guys remember Polybotes?" "The giant who invaded Camp Jupiter," Hazel said. "The anti-Poseidon you whacked in the head with a Terminus statue. Yes, I think I remember ↗

— Rick Riordan

#camp-jupiter #hazel-levesque #heroes-of-olympus #humor #percy-jackson

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze." (Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913) ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#spite #writing #humor

Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#harry-dresden #humor #humor

We need to bridge the gap between the medical libraries and the hospital rooms; take the information out there already, add to it, focus it, harness it - and bring it to the patient who was just diagnosed today. ↗

— Bruce Vento

#already #between #bridge #bring #diagnosed

In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn? ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#pity #scorn #imagination

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#choice #corporations #economics #information #power

Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil. ↗

— William Cullen Bryant

#justice #labor #rights #unions #imagination