Sometimes I find good quotes that haven’t been turned into a Facebook meme exclusively posted by the worst people you know. Yet.
Addiction
“There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.” - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Power and Politics
“The very social scientists who are so anxious to offer our generation counsels of salvation and are disappointed that an ignorant and slothful people are so slow to accept their wisdom, betray middle-class prejudices in almost everything they write. Since reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest in a social situation, social injustice cannot be resolved by moral and rational suasion alone, as the educator and social scientist usually believed. Conflict is inevitable, and in this conflict power must be challenged by power.” - Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
“…crises are not accidental to a culture focused on safety, they are its raison d’etre. In such a society, each crisis is the motor and the end of control systems; each initially singular emergency is carefully saved, analyzed and codified. More profoundly and less obviously, crises and codes are complementary because they are both central to the emergence of what appears to be the antithesis of both automation and codes: user agency. Codes and crises together produce (the illusion of) mythical and mystical sovereign subjects who weld together norm with reality, word with action. Exceptional crises justify states of exception that undo the traditional democratic separation of executive and legislative branches.” - Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks
Psychoanalysis
“A neurotic is one who refuses the loan of life in order to avoid the debt of death.” - Otto Rank, Will Therapy (1936)
Technology
“The computer programmer, however, is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. So, of course, is the designer of any game. But universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborates act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has every exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. One would have to be astonished if Lord Action’s observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable. It does apply. And the corruption evoked by the computer programmer’s omnipotence manifests itself in a form that is instructive in a domain far larger than the immediate environment of the computer. To understand it, we will have to take a look at a mental disorder that, while actually very old, appears to have been transformed by the computer into a new genus: the compulsion to program.”
- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation