2017 Quotes
308 quotes
"None of this "there is no way to continue" bullshit. Because it is pure and utter SHIT."
"Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn't qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, "I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent." And I said, "Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something." And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did."
"I think Rex Tillerson is absolutely clear in his view, which is the same as mine. You have got to engage with Russia, but you have got to engage in a very guarded way. You have got to beware of what they are up to. There is no question that, when you look at Russian activity on the cyber front, when you look at what they are doing in the western Balkans, when you look at what has been happening in the Ukraine, you've got to be very, very cautious. I think it is entirely right to have a dual track approach. We don't want to get into a new Cold War. That's something London and Washington are completely at one on. But nor do we want Russian behaviour to continue as it is - and Rex Tillerson has been very clear about that."
"There is no plan for no deal because we are going to get a great deal,"
"There's a group of UK business people, wonderful guys who want to invest in , on the coast, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed as some of you may have seen. And they literally have a brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, to turn it into the next . The only thing they've got to do is clear the dead bodies away and then they'll be there."
"[At a Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting on 1 November 2017] When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it. [Neither] Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe nor her family has been informed about what crime she has actually committed. And that I find extraordinary, incredible."
"People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?"
"Well, Milo learned HIS lesson. Pederasty acceptable only for refugees and illegals. Then libs will support you."
"On the bright side, maybe sending men in dresses into women's bathrooms will reduce number of women in our fighting forces."
"I was kinda torn on-on that. (Donald Trump's announcement he was banning transgender individuals from the US military) I know Congress was looking at it. So maybe he signed a bill they passed or something, but the upside is that the army was refusing to prohibit, you know, big hairy men from going into the ladies' locker room in the Marines, in the army. And I thought, "Well, you know, maybe finally this will cut down on girls in the marines.""
"In order to get the funding through for the wall, it was being held up by conservatives – or I would have thought, you know, sane humans – in the Senate who don’t want taxpayers like you and me paying for these lengthy transgender operations, years of therapy."
"I mean, for Pete’s sake, you can’t get into the military, or used to not be able to get into the military, who knows now, if you had asthma, psoriasis, attention deficit disorder, but we’re going to bring in people with an extremely peculiar and rare mental illness...and have the taxpayers pay for it."
"The only thing I'll say in defense of basically the entire conservative media is that, except for a few talk radio hosts, my twitter feed, I guess Brietbart, and Daily Caller is everyone seems to dislike Richard Spencer. He is you know our equivalent of Black Lives Matter. Apparently you know a gay showboater who just wants lots of media attention."
"I don't believe Hurricane Harvey is God's punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor. But that is more credible than "climate change.""
"This is the second chance to be a fellow that Chelsea Manning has blown"
"I wasn't a huge fan of Tony Benn, I think he was a fraud in many ways."
"I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days."
"I’m still asking you to believe – not in my ability to bring about change, but in yours. I believe in change because I believe in you."
"As I’ve said many times before, true democracy is a project that’s much bigger than any one of us. It’s bigger than any one person, any one president, any one government. It’s a job for all of us. It requires everyday sustained effort from all of us — the work of perfecting our union is never finished. We look forward to joining you in that effort as fellow citizens."
"People have a tendency to blame politicians when things don't work, but as I always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve. And if you don't vote and you don't pay attention, you'll get policies that don't reflect your interest."
"If I become so convinced that ‘I’m always right,’ the logical conclusion of that often ends up being great cruelty and great violence."
"We can find people on the internet who agree with our ideas, no matter how crazy. Democracies do not work if we are not operating on some level based on reason and fact and logic - and not just passion. We're going to have to find ways to push back on propaganda and listen to those we don't agree with."
"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. ... People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. ... For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."
"...phishing on Wikipedia is effective enough – and lucrative enough – to retain the interest of the dark net's richest dwellers. ... Although Wikipedia's editors work to root out the false links, it's a slow and never-ending fight."
"The researchers [...] found that the Wikipedia entries were written at a much higher reading level compared with the medication guides and well above the average consumer reading level, which could contribute to patient misunderstanding of medication information. ... The study authors conclude that as the public use of Wikipedia increases, the need for health care professionals and the pharmaceutical industry to actively educate and provide reliable resources to patients remains important."
"Page views of Wikipedia are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude."
"For the record the Daily Mail banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability."
"The fate that befell the Mail happened for one reason, and one reason alone: it's terrible, and by banning it, Wikipedia sends a message that it values its credibility."
"Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued – for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit. ... Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors."
"However clumsy the Youth Parliament's approach to Wikipedia may be, it's still an improvement on a government order issued by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last August, when he established a working group to study the creation of an all new Russian-engineered Wikipedia clone."
"...for an organisation that calls itself a ‘small non-profit' business and begs users for donations (‘the price of a cup of coffee') to keep it afloat, it enjoys bulging cash reserves. The Foundation's accounts show it has assets of more than $90 million (£73 million), and spent $31 million (£25 million) in salaries last year, up from $26 million (£21 million) the year before. ... Are these amounts not excessive?"
"...this ban has set a dangerous precedent, raising profoundly troubling questions about free speech and censorship in the online era. ...a social media giant whose pages are riddled with inaccuracies, unilaterally deciding, at the request of a handful of people, that a major newspaper is somehow not valid."
"False information is being disseminated at a far greater rate when it seems to have been vetted by a brand name and Wikipedia's branding is global. It would be ideal if a more credible site like Encyclopedia Britannica or a useful news site like Reuters could be granted the “zero-rate” – but those sites [...] do [not] have the same foundational interest in spreading their content without financial gain that Wikipedia has."
"Wikipedia, as it is currently run, is simply and literally out of control, and a potential menace to all kinds of institutions and individuals. This is an organisation that – quite scandalously – polices itself, judges itself, and legitimises itself. It is always right because it decides what is right. You are always wrong because it decides what is wrong. ... And it has power without responsibility or accountability. ... It is high time this arrogant, self-admiring, self-regulating, often bullying organisation be placed under the formal supervision of an independent watchdog."
"I fear we are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, teachers and students, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those with achievement in an area and those with none."
"Despite being an American-born site, its popularity and utility have expanded around the world since its foundation in 2001."
"Wikipedia has often been treated by news organizations like the black sheep of the information business. ... But as trust in the media wanes and news organizations struggle to engage with readers, Wikipedia has emerged as a leader in transparency and user growth..."
"The cyber age has tremendous potential, as indicated by Wikipedia. But if it bypasses space and time where there's just this obsession with the present – this neglect of our heritage and history – then our world will change."
"For the benefit of Wales as a nation, it is crucial that Wikipedia contains a wealth of knowledge about its history and culture and that the range of articles on the Welsh language Wicipedia covers the widest possible range of subjects."
"Unlike some commercial companies, Wikimedia has no incentive to cave into authoritarian demands to self-censor."
"The online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is perceived as increasingly trustworthy, [...] with immediate impacts on scientific literacy."
"Wikipedia, like other new, non-commercial information technologies, can be used to open new public spaces for [indigenous] languages, and gradually recover the ground lost to more dominant languages. ... However, the representation of indigenous languages on the platform is very low,... [In Latin America indigenous communities speak 420 different languages.] To date, only four official indigenous-language versions are represented: Quechua ..., Náhuatl ..., Aymara ... and Guaraní."
"As the originator of and the first person to elaborate Wikipedia's neutrality policy, and as an agnostic who believes intelligent design to be completely wrong, I just have to say that this article is appallingly biased. ... I'm not here to argue the point, as I completely despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways."
"In many ways Wikipedia pioneered the [fake news] phenomenon, and journalists' lazy reliance on using it as a source helped falsities to propagate on a scale never seen before."
"As we are trying to deal with all this terrorism, [Wikipedia] makes us look like we work with terror groups."
"Let me just stipulate. I am for getting along. I am for colorblindness, I’m for tolerance, 100%. But I also think that if things radically change in your country, it’s okay for you to say, what is this, and maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in. Is that bigoted?"
"Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all."
"It’s going to confuse the living shit out of our viewers . . . When’s the last time you saw someone defend Iran on Fox News? Right around never?"
"The Russia stuff, the lies, the bullying, the ignorance, the bullshit. Look, I know I'm not going to be here much longer. But I'd like to think that even if that weren't the case, I would have enough self-respect not to kiss his ass like this."
"Anything short of radical change to the Republican party’s war on voters of color is merely feigned outrage. Even if the white supremacists are condemned, even if the entire Republican party rises up in self-professed outrage at white supremacists, if voter suppression and other such racist policies survive, the white supremacists are winning. And America is losing."
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