Gavin

“Goodness… You gotta make it out of badness... Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Vacuum pumps driven by electric motors are forced into American households for the purpose of cleaning an obsolete form of floor covering, the carpet or the rug, whose appropriateness for use in interiors, if it did not disappear with the caravans where it originated, certainly passed out of existence with rubber heels and steam-heated houses. To count such pathetic examples of waste to the credit of the machine is like counting the rise in the number of constipation remedies a proof of the benefits of leisure.”
― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

“Human beings differ from other animals because they are sufficiently intelligent to wish that they could stop working and reasoning – and free enough to toil harder than other creatures to pursue both these aims in order to eventually enjoy free time.

It follows that Homo faber and Homo sapiens are only contingent consequences of the truly essential Homo ludens. The fact that philosophers do not typically endorse this view only clarifies why they rarely qualify as champions of common sense…”
― Luciano Floridi, Philosophy and Computing

“Identity is a very strange concept. It can mean two opposite things. It can mean that which makes you unique and it can mean that which makes you identical.

There are all these different experiences people have. There is an African American experience, there is a women’s experience, there is a gay experience… You don’t want to pretend that it does not exist and you don’t want to make it all-important. It is very hard for us to find the right way to talk about this.

As a gay person I don’t want to be in the closet, but I also don’t want to be in the ghetto. The closet and the ghetto are exclusive – those are two different possibilities – but I hope they are not exhaustive, that those are not the only two.”
― Peter Thiel