Unifying Strategy

It's a unifying strategy to be outraged at the other guy.  The hard part is when you get in and have to deliver.

-- Adam Brandon, president of conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks, on Republicans' difficulty in passing a health-care bill, New York Times, 9 July 2017

Self Restraint

Self restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war.

-- General Vincent K. Brooks, commander of US troops in South Korea, in a warning to North Korea after their ICBM test 2 days earlier, New York Times, 6 July 2017

Sympathize With The Zombies

To me, the zombies have always just been zombies.  They've always been a cigar.  When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion.  The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever.  But I never thought about it that way.  My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly.  I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies.  I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.

-- George Romero (4 February 1940 - 16 July 2017), American-Canadian filmmaker, writer, and editor, best known for Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Vanity Fair, "Who Says Zombies Eat Brains?" 27 May 2010

Treating Words As Crimes

I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth.  To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.

-- Liu Xiaobo (28 December 1955 - 13 July 2017), Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule, NPR "Liu Xiaobo: 'No Enemies, No Hatred', Only Courage", 16 February 2012

Net Neutrality

I am a big advocate of what is known as net neutrality.  This means that providers are compelled to transmit content without political or commercial pre-selection.

-- Thomas de Maiziere (1954-), German politician and current Federal Minister of the Interior (2009-2011, 2013-), in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, 20 December 2010

Transparency

* Entertainment promoter Rob Goldstone, in an email to Donald Trump Jr, 3 June 2016, 10:36, pursuing a meeting with Trump Jr and Trump campaign officials on behalf of "a Russian government lawyer":

The Crown prosecutor of Russia ... offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.  This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but its part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.


* Donald Trump Jr's reply, 17 minutes later:

[I]f it’s what you say I love it. ...  Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?

Pirate State

If the state’s existence is no longer to be preserved in such a way that great individuals can live within it, what will then arise is the terrifying state filled with misery, the pirate state in which the strongest individuals take the place of the best.  ...  The task of the state is to make it generally possible for one to live well and beautifully therein.  Its task is to furnish the basis of a culture.  In short, a nobler humanity is the goal of the state.  Its goal lies outside of itself.  The state is a means.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, from "Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Friedrich Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s" edited and translated by Daniel Breazeale