mcdspot

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

- Vladimir Nabokov

It’s like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom from Alaska…is the president. She’s facing down Vladimir Putin using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd.

– Matt Damon, 9/10-08

And thus the trailer was born.

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not by the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

– Abbie Hoffman

“Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology - fossil fuels - rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology - renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the IT revolution - on the eve of PCs and the Internet - is pounding the table for America to make more IBM typewriters and carbon paper. ‘Typewriters, baby, typewriters.’ ”

– Thomas L. Friedman

I don’t want to ruin it. You’ll just have to read the last line of this story.

“Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis, so that’s kinda cool.”

– Spencer Elden, 17-year-old who was pictured naked on Nirvana’s Nevermind album in 1991 when he was an infant, from the this NPR story. Via Andraya.

“I think it’s pretty redneck myself,” he said, laughing. “But I’m a redneck anyway, so.”

– William Christopher, father of a bride who recently married in a Waffle House.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
- Ambrose Bierce

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

— John Adams, Journal, 1772

“[I]t can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.”

– United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explaining why the handgun is Americans’ preferred weapon of self-defense.

“I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

– George W. Bush, in an interview in which he expressed regret over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood.