“All those years I kept trying and failing and trying to find my one special talent in this life—Why did it take me so long to figure out that my special talent was trying?”—Tony Hoagland
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Just as “splendid isolation” from Europe led many British leaders to erroneously conclude that they could largely ignore the messy world of continental politics, freedom from life’s messiness has allowed Scott Adams to develop a worldview that is remarkably theoretical, surprisingly esoteric, and shockingly elitist.
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“My mom always used to say . . . you can’t control what people do to you, but you can control how you react. So I promised myself. I said, ‘I’ll never give a racist person the pleasure of seeing my pain.’ It may be painful, may be hurtful, but I won’t give them the pleasure of seeing my pain.”
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“My marriage ended in an airport parking lot—so long ago. I was not wise enough to cry while looking for my car.”—Tony Hoagland
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This is some next-level bad-ass shit-talking. If Harry Callahan was a general, I suspect that he would sound a whole lot like Mad Dog Mattis.
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If you can convince your followers that the words of your opponents constitute “violence”, you can convince them to support real, old-fashioned, physical violence against your opponents. It’s a clever hustle. Beware of it.
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“I think there is no higher form of love available as a human being than staring your best friend dead in the eyes and just destroying every life decision they have ever made up until that moment in time, with no mercy, no remorse.”—Daniel Sloss, X (2019)
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The AK-47 is the revolutionary’s gun of choice the world over, not because it’s a particularly precise instrument, but rather because it’s unbelievably reliable in less than ideal circumstances. It can fire when it’s wet, dirty, rusty, bent. If your proposed system isn’t as reliable as an AK-47, if it only works in ideal circumstances, maybe it’s not a particularly good system.
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To identify someone’s class origin in less than 30 seconds, compliment them on something they’re wearing and carefully evaluate their response.
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The moral clarity of most cynics is probably a function of some sort of emotional colorblindness.
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It’s one of social science’s greatest hits: a fidgety little kid sits alone, in a room, with a marshmallow.
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A society that balances the virtues of competitiveness with those of honesty and fair-play will produce genuine competence and excellence.
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“Back in the day, if I woke up in a bad mood, I’d turn to the guy next to me and say: ‘I feel bad because you did X or you didn’t do Y.’”
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Trump belongs to his movement as much as or more than his movement belongs to him. It’s bigger than him, it’s more dangerous than him, and it will have to be reckoned with even after Trump himself departs this scene.
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Since the coronavirus pandemic hit, a lot of couples that were effectively part-time have become full-time due to the quarantine. So far as I can tell, this seems to be driving those who prefer a “part-time lover” crazy.
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MacDonald was a total douche and I really won’t miss his statue. But if we lose our mostly peaceful way of dealing with political differences, I’ll miss that a great deal.
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Privilege isn’t always a privilege. Pampered princesses often become pathetic pansies who can’t sleep on peas.
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Religion shapes how you think and believe far more than what you think and believe.
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Although there are plenty of good reasons to be pissed off, being perpetually pissed off does not, in and of itself, make you a good person.
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The great genius of Louis CK is that he shows us how much of a living hell it must be to be a teenage boy stuck in a grown man’s life.
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