2016 Quotes

“When it rains look for rainbows, when it's dark look for stars.”
― Anonymous

“Dear world, I am excited to be alive in you, and I am thankful for another year.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I've written.”
― Stephen King

“Perhaps it was true a century ago—I deeply regret that it is no longer true—but the United States criminal justice system long ago lost any legitimate claim to the loyal cooperation of American citizens. You cannot write tens of thousands of criminal statutes, including many touching upon conduct that is neither immoral nor dangerous, write those laws as broadly as you can imagine, scatter them throughout the thousands of pages of the United States Code—and then expect decent law-abiding, unsuspecting citizens to cooperate with an investigation into whether they may have violated some law they have never even heard about. The next time some police officer or government agent asks you whether you would be willing to answer a few questions about where you have been and what you have been doing, you must respectfully but very firmly decline.”
― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“This year has taught me the simple craft of belief. I believe in the things I’ve nurtured and built this year. Slowly but carefully. Such as understanding, knowledge, passion, strength; the hundreds of songs I’ve written, the 365 poems, the books I’ve read and the miles I’ve run. The resolution to breathe, to meditate, to not harm my mind or body even when I’ve felt like it. ”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“If a police officer encounters you in one of those moments, he or she has every right to ask you two simple questions. Memorize these two questions so you will not be tempted to answer any others:

Who are you?
What are you doing right here, right now?

If you are ever approached by a police officer with those two questions, and your God-given common sense tells you that the officer is being reasonable in asking for an explanation, don’t be a jerk.”
― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“Dear 2016,

If I had any defeats in your team, I am glad they were on my terms.

Love,
Defeated Winner”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber

“[A]ny lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.”
― Robert H. Jackson, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“If you are asked any question by a police officer or a government agent and you realize that it is not in your best interest to answer, you should not mention the Fifth Amendment privilege or tell the police that you wish to exercise your right to avoid incriminating yourself. In this day and age, there is too great a danger that the police and the prosecutor might later persuade the judge to use that statement against you as evidence of your guilt. And if they do, to make matters much worse, you have no guarantee that the FBI agent in your case will not slightly misremember your exact words. [....] Even if the officer gets only a few words wrong, it only takes a slight rewording of the privilege to make it sound like a confession.

So what do you do instead?

Instead mention your Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer, and tell the police that you want a lawyer.”
― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just what particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.”
― Stephen G. Breyer, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“Do you know where you were on Thursday evening at about eight o'clock last week, and who you were with, and what you were doing? Are you absolutely certain beyond any shadow of a doubt? Would you bet your life on it? If there is any possibility—no matter how slim or remote—that you could possibly be mistaken about such a thing, you are the kind of person who should never agree to talk to the police under just about any circumstances for as long as you live. And that includes practically everybody.”
― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“In 2016, into this tangle of worry and anger, came a showman who made big promises. A man who swore he would drain the swamp, then surrounded himself with the lobbyists and billionaires who run the swamp and feed off government favors. A man who talked the talk of populism but offered the very worst of trickle-down economics. A man who said he knew how the corrupt system worked because he had worked it for himself many times. A man who vowed to make America great again and followed up with attacks on immigrants, minorities, and women. A man who was always on the hunt for his next big con.”
― Elizabeth Warren, This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class

“But even when Facebook isn't deliberately exploiting its users, it is exploiting its users—its business model requires it. Even if you distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and our desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on Facebook for news. Then, with the media both reliant on Facebook as a way of reaching readers and powerless against the platform's ability to suck up digital advertising revenue—it was like a paperboy who pocketed all the subscription money—Facebook bent the media's economic model to match its own practices: publications needed to capture attention quickly and consistently trigger high emotional responses to be seen at all. The result, in 2016, was an unending stream of Trump stories, both from the mainstream news and from the fringe outlets that were buoyed by Facebook's algorithm. What began as a way for Zuckerberg to harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“When out in public, and are uncertain of a person's gender… stop worrying about it. It doesn't matter. They are a person.”
― Lee Harrington, Traversing Gender: Understanding Transgender Realities

“Dear 2016,

If I had any defeats in your term, I am glad they were on my terms!

Best,
The Defeated Winner”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber

“When I threw the stick at Jamie, I hadn't intended to hit him with it. But the moment it left my hand, I knew that's what was going to happen. I didn't yet know any calculus or geometry, but I was able to plot, with some degree of certainty, the trajectory of that stick. The initial velocity, the acceleration, the impact. The mathematical likelihood of Jamie's bloody cheek.

It had good weight and heft, that stick. It felt nice to throw. And it looked damn fine in the overcast sky, too, flying end over end, spinning like a heavy, two-pronged pinwheel and (finally, indifferently, like math) connecting with Jamie's face.

Jamie's older sister took me by the arm and she shook me. Why did you do that? What were you thinking? The anger I saw in her eyes. Heard in her voice. The kid I became to her then, who was not the kid I thought I was. The burdensome regret. I knew the word "accident" was wrong, but I used it anyway. If you throw a baseball at a wall and it goes through a window, that is an accident. If you throw a stick directly at your friend and it hits your friend in the face, that is something else.

My throw had been something of a lob and there had been a good distance between us. There had been ample time for Jamie to move, but he hadn't moved. There had been time for him to lift a hand and protect his face from the stick, but he hadn't done that either. He just stood impotent and watched it hit him. And it made me angry: That he hadn't tried harder at a defense. That he hadn't made any effort to protect himself from me.

What was I thinking? What was he thinking?

I am not a kid who throws sticks at his friends. But sometimes, that's who I've been. And when I've been that kid, it's like I'm watching myself act in a movie, reciting somebody else's damaging lines.

Like this morning, over breakfast. Your eyes asking mine to forget last night's exchange. You were holding your favorite tea mug. I don't remember what we were fighting about. It doesn't seem to matter any more. The words that came out of my mouth then, deliberate and measured, temporarily satisfying to throw at the bored space between us. The slow, beautiful arc. The spin and the calculated impact.

The downward turn of your face.

The heavy drop in my chest.

The word "accident" was wrong. I used it anyway.”
― David Olimpio, This Is Not a Confession

“Donald Trump is magnificently terrifying to reasonable Americans because his popularity, win or lose, illuminates a massive stratum of voting, gun-toting Americans who want desperately to be told that their binary values are valid. They want someone to enunciate for them what they know in their heart of hearts: that they and their prejudices and their lust for violence and their stalwart refusal to take part in a complex world of political moving parts puts them in league with the men who waited for the British, guns in hand at Concord Bridge.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“The shift from precious metals to paper in retrospect clarifies that artifacts serving as money tokens are no more than representations of abstract exchange value—they are thus ultimately coveted for their potential use in social transaction, nor for some imagined, essential value intrinsic to the money tokens themselves. If it were not for international agreements such as those of Bretton Woods, gold could conceivably be as useless a medium of exchange in some cultural contexts as seashells are to modern Europeans.

This understanding of money, however, simultaneously implies that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. If value ubiquitously pertains to social relations, any notion of intrinsic value is an illusion. Although the European plundering and hoarding of gold and silver, like the Melanesian preoccupation with kula and the Andean reverence for Spondylus, has certainly been founded on such essentialist conceptions of value, the recent representation of exchange value in the form of electronic digits on computer screens is a logical trajectory of the kind of transformation propagated by [Marco] Polo. It is difficult to imagine how money appearing as electronic information could be perceived as possessing intrinsic value. This suggests that electronic money, although currently maligned as the root of the financial crisis, could potentially help us rid ourselves of money fetishism. Paradoxically, the progressive detachment of money from matter, obvious in the transitions from metals through paper to electronics, is simultaneously a source of critique and a source of hope.”
― Alf Hornborg, Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street

“wut good lo l”
― Obama Christ, LOLLIPOP PART 6: HIDDEN BABIES

“Dear 2016,

If I has any defeats in your term, I am glad they were on my terms!

Best,
The Defeated Winner”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber

“Few men or women in our lifetimes have been so unjustly vilified in the popular media as the late Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court. If you are not a lawyer who read his opinions, if you know nothing about Justice Scalia other than what you have read in the popular press, you have surely been deceived into believing that this man was some sort of archconservative who could regularly be counted upon to side with the government and trample the constitutional liberties of the poor and the powerless. The truth is much more complicated than that. While Justice Scalia was, by his own admission, exceptionally stingy in refusing to accept arguments about constitutional rights that involved some aspect of general "liberty" that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution—rights like abortion, or same-sex marriage—when it came to the defense of constitutional liberties that are explicitly described in the Constitution, no other recent member of the Supreme Court was so uncompromisingly passionate and liberal in refusing to water down those protections.”
― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“I remember thinking, So this is it then. This is what it's come to for them, the poor bastards. This doing of life. This simple, just living in the world. The laying of plans that hadn't already been laid. The long preparation, ending. And for what? Here's what it amounted to: furniture and teaching. And on the one hand, it seemed like the bravest thing to me: to just go out and do that thing. And on the other, the most depressing: to just go out and do that thing. The thing that you've chosen to do, and by so choosing, shutting out all the other things. It took an awful lot of certainty to make that sort of choice. The choice to spend the time you have doing the thing you want to do.”
― David Olimpio, This Is Not a Confession

“If you are to be a homeowner, you need to do all these things. You need to keep your exterior tidy. After all, it serves as an outward reflection of the stuff going on inside. Doesn't it? If the walls are crumbling, so must be your marriage. If the paint is chipping, so must be your will to live.”
― David Olimpio, This Is Not a Confession

“An underlying question for many people is "what kind of person do you want to be" in their new expression of gender. There is a need for more diverse expressions of "manhood" and "womanhood," "girlhood" and "boyhood" for everyone in culture. Right now there is a story that to become a man or a woman you must act, talk, walk, and dress a certain way. The belief that people of certain genders have to behave in specific ways invalidates people as a whole, trans and non-trans alike.

This becomes a call for healthy gender expressions to be modeled for all children. Parents as well as other adults need to model and encourage everyone to be their best, healthiest, self. We get to move beyond our current culture that belittles girls for pursuing intellectual passions, or boys for expressing emotions; a culture that conflates masculinity with abusive behavior, and femininity with victimhood. Examining these issues creates an opportunity to craft a world where people of any gender expression to explore everything they are passionate about, engage with their emotions, and express themselves fully; a world transformed for our children to live without abuse, regardless of our path in life.”
― Lee Harrington, Traversing Gender: Understanding Transgender Realities

“Some people try to incorporate religion and science by saying, “Just add a Creator to evolution.” That is a total category mistake, pseudoscience. It is not what faith is all about. It is difficult for a religious person to convey the meaning of faith. Spirituality perceives what is happening around us in a way that science cannot and is not intended to see.”
― Bas C. Van Fraassen

“As a result, there is no technical mechanism that can ensure that every layer in the system is unaltered and thus no technical mechanism that can ensure that a computer application will produce accurate results.”
― Lee C. Bollinger, Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy

“Faivre’s starting point is the observation of a “family resemblance” between various religious and philosophical currents in the history of Western culture. He assumes that this family resemblance is based on a common “form of thought” that one can call “esoteric” and that is distinct from other typical forms of Western thought, such as the theological or the scientific. He further claims that it is possible to identify a number of characteristics that are at the basis of the esoteric form of thought. He considers four of these characteristics to be fundamental, and two others to be secondary. The fundamental ones are correspondences, living nature, imagination/mediations, and transmutation; the two secondary ones are correlation and transmission. The four fundamental characteristics must all be present simultaneously to identify a current, a movement, an author, or a text as esoteric.”
― Marco Pasi, Esotericism Emergent: The Beginning of the Study of Esotericism in the Academy

“...if I was willing to sound cynical - that the only reason that psychiatrists diagnose their clients is so that insurance companies can pay the bills, and I actually believe that that's more true than the claim that the psychiatric diagnostic categories actually capture the essence of the person's problems.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“I was working towards my bachelor's degree in creative writing at Arizona State University when videos, pictures, and stories from these protests started blooming across my Facebook feed. I saw Native people holding their ground and being ground down by the opposing police force. I saw them bitten by dogs and hosed down and maimed by rubber bullets hitting their faces and bodies, all while bright white words scrolled across the bottom of the video, explaining the situation and giving statistics.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“My Jewish problem is figuring out
why America in 2016 has a dab
of 1930s German Fascism to it--
people at political rallies
yelling crap about the Jews.”
― Bob Hicok