The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal”, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

Anonymous

The quote is attributed to George Carlin on many web pages, yet it’s nowhere to be found on Carlin’s works.

A cop is a cop. And you know, he may be a very nice man but I haven’t got time to figure that out. All I know is that he got a uniform and a gun, I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way for me to relate to him, at all, because one of us may have to die.

You know in New York there’s a big campaign going on to humanize the policemen and they have billboards upstate and they a picture of a big cop bending over this little blonde girl and the sign said “some people call him pig”. I wanted to buy a billboard, I told a friend of mine, I wanted to buy a billboard and show this big cop and this fourteen-year-old kid with thirty bullets in him and say “some people call him peacemaker”.

James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni

The “capitalism <-> socialism” opposition seems outdated. I prefer to think in terms of “centralization vs decentralization”. Humans have evolved to perform best in small groups of less than 150 people. That’s why wherever there’s centralization and excessive hierarchy, there’s inefficiency and underutilized human potential. Capitalist monopolies and socialist dictatorships are equally bad.

In a natural environment, every small community is able to produce an outstanding leader and an independent thinker. In today’s world of trillion-dollar monopolies and bloated governments, the potential of hundreds of millions of people is suppressed by the limitations imposed by our artificial societal structures.

That is the reason why tens of thousands of people working at big corporations such as Facebook have failed to keep up with what our small team at Telegram has been implementing. That’s also the reason why countries like Russia fail to generate and retain global brands in their jurisdictions. Genuine creativity is rare in organizations and societies built on excessive hierarchies and lack of personal autonomy.

Pavel Durov

If someone says to you it’s raining outside and someone else says to you it’s not raining outside, your job is not to say “person A says it’s raining, person B says it’s not raining.” Your job is to open the fucking window and find out if it’s raining outside.

Mehdi Hasan

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Karl Marx