Tuesday, January 12, 2016

The Best Words: January 2016

As a public service once a month, I share a few of my favorite things. In quote form. If you also want to see what I think was funny on Twitter, here's the link. And here us goes!

“From the first moment I laid eyes on you, I have always, always loved...your money.”
-House on Haunted Hill
  
"They're starving to death. They're dying of disease to death."
-The West Wing

“I keep thinking about our great dueling Jesus pictures, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of The Christ. Both look to the suffering of Jesus for meaning, but the two films approach that suffering from totally different ways. For Scorsese the suffering of Christ wasn't being nailed to the cross (although that did suck for him), it was being shown the life he could have if he just gave up the mantle of Messiah. The suffering of Willem DaFoe's Christ is an emotional one, and it's a suffering that makes Christ all the more human, as we can truly relate to the idea of giving up our dreams for something bigger or more important. We've all known what it's like to put duty before happiness. In The Passion of the Christ Jim Caviezel's Christly suffering is almost purely physical; while I can get that on a gut level (just as I can recoil at all slasher and splatter pictures) I can't truly relate to being relentlessly flogged. Emotional torture I get. Physical torture is distant.”
-Devin Faraci

“Off to the movies we will go
Where we learn everything that we know
Because the movies teach us
What our parents don’t have time to say!”
-South Park

“Two hundred years ago, we had great-great-greats who lived in the dark, without much in the way of healthcare, commerce or opportunity.

“Today, we complain that the MRI was chilly, or that the wifi on the transatlantic plane wasn't fast enough or that there's nothing new going on at the mall.

“It's human nature to recalibrate. But maybe it's worth fighting that off, for an hour or even a day.

“The world around us is uneven, unfair and yes, absolutely, over-the-top amazing.

“Boring is an attitude, not the truth.”
-Seth Godin

“Double dumbass on you!”
-Star Trek IV

“He had an almost freakish ability to identify shadowy motives. If you had just donated $20 million to your alma mater, say, and were feeling the glow of selfless devotion to a cause greater than yourself, Lippman would be the first to ask, ‘So you gave twenty mission because that’s the minimum to get your name on a building, right?’”

“In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”

“Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.”

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”

“That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.”
Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.”
-Neil Gaiman

”You always have to bring that up, don’t you?”
“You put dynamite in the oven, Wayne.”
“Gotta hide a gift where nobody’ll look for it.”
Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self

"It's almost impossible to persuade someone that he's wrong. Almost impossible to make your argument louder and sharper and have the other person say, 'I was wrong and I will change my mind.' Far more effective: Help someone make a new decision, based on new alternatives and a new story."
-Seth Godin

“Dreams are a dime a dozen...it’s their execution that counts.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

“Success is 99 percent failure.”
-Soichiro Honda

“If you lend money, you make a secret enemy; if you refuse, an open one.”
-Voltaire

“[I would say] ‘Hang, on. Explain to me, what is a dysfunctional family?’ And people would explain, and after a while, I realized that what Americans called a ‘dysfunctional family’ is what we in England call ‘a family,’ having never encountered any of these functional ones.”
-Neil Gaiman

“Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”
-U2


-Phony McFakename

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