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Stasi couldn’t record what newspaper articles you were reading. For how long. And in what order. That, along with pretty much every thought you have ever explored while sitting at a computer, is now part of your permanent record – even if you never told a single human being.

Rick Falkvinge

http://falkvinge.net/2013 ... an-stasi-or-orwells-1984/

Every day we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life..., our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Hannah Arendt

"The Origins of Totalitarianism"

[..] there's some line that divides games that are beneficial from games that are harmful. It's not really my business to draw that line today, I don't wanna try and convince you exactly what's beneficial and what's harmful, because again, that is up to the opinion of every designer and in fact the opinion of every player. But what I would like is for people to have an opinion about it. When people design a game to think about what that game is doing, and when people play a game to think about what that game is doing. And people don't, right now. They think about how it has cool graphics and a lot of levels and, like, they love the story about killing the bad guy. Which is not a very self-aware place to be standing when you're consuming something that affects your life for so many hours and therefore affects your mind for so many hours. And that bothers me. That makes me feel bad about being a game designer.

Jonathan Blow

Video Games and the Human Condition

I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.

Sophie Scholl

The sad thing is that individuals interested in freedom, who make serious contributions to some things called free, don't notice that the massive imbalances of wealth today have produced a situation where simple "free choice" is made a mockery of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990829

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.

Noam Chomsky

"Understanding Power" (2002)

People are always talking about looking for the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is a deep experience of life.

Joseph Campbell

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Honoré de Balzac

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

David Graeber

"The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"

In recent years, monopolistic tech giants have reaped fantastic gains in efficiency and cost savings, often at the expense of individual privacy and labor rights. To add “war profiteer” to that list would only further diminish an industry that, with equal parts naïveté and swagger, has so often failed at trying to do good.

Jacob Silverman

https://newrepublic.com/a ... ry-dilemma-silicon-valley

If our conversation is to have meaning, it must be to make that 'No!' louder, to magnify the pain and the fury and the dignity. There is always a danger that by placing an object in a museum, you silence it, you [..] dumb it down.

John Holloway

https://arthistory.berkel ... isobedient-roundtable.pdf

Wir leben in einer kannibalischen Weltordnung, die sich durch zwei Dinge auszeichnet: eine unglaublichen Monopolisierung von politischer, ökonomischer und ideologischer Macht in den Händen weniger Oligarchen, die niemand kontrolliert, und enorme Ungleichheit unter den Menschen.

Jean Ziegler

Interview in FORMAT Ausgabe 11/2015

They smell your breath lest you have said: I love you. 
  They smell your heart; 
  These are strange times, my dear. 
They flog love 
at the roadblock. 
Let's hide love in the larder. 

In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends 
they feed fires 
with logs of song and poetry 
Hazard not a thought: 
  These are strange times, my dear. 

The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night 
has come to kill the light. 
  Let's hide light in the larder. 

There, butchers are posted in passageways 
with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers: 
  These are strange times, my dear. 

They chop smiles off lips, 
and songs off the mouth: 
Let's hide joy in the larder.

Ahmad Shamlu

"In This Blind Alley"

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

Immanuel Kant

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The printer industry leads the world when it comes to using technology to confiscate value from the public, and HP leads the printer industry.

But these are infectious grifts. For would-be robber-barons, "smart" gadgets are a moral hazard, an irresistible temptation to use those smarts to reconfigure the very nature of private property, such that only companies can truly own things, and the rest of us are mere licensors, whose use of the devices we purchase is bound by the ever-shifting terms and conditions set in distant boardrooms.

From Apple to John Deere to GM to Tesla to Medtronic, the legal fiction that you don't own anything is used to force you to arrange your affairs to benefit corporate shareholders at your own expense.

https://www.eff.org/deepl ... place-inside-your-printer