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Shortform

Quotes, chirps and short notes.

2025

📷 Reddit answers its own question Reddit screenshot: the question "Who is the most evil person alive today?" directly above a photo of a passenger who bagged her airplane seatback so the tray table behind can't open
❝ Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

2024

❝ I think I would personally prefer to let this man live in confinement and let him meditate on his deeds, yet in the name of justice and the majesty of law, there ought to be one case, at least one specific instance, of a professional slave-trader, a Northern white man, given the exact penalty of death because of the incalculable number of deaths he and his kind inflicted upon black men amid the horror of the sea-voyage from Africa.
— Abraham Lincoln

2023

🐦 Remember to actually DONATE to campaigns you find interesting. This is important ad season, especially for lesser-known candidates. Whoever you support, do more than talk about it.
🐦 If we are very lucky, one day in the long tail of history before the earth cools and the stars extinguish, hotels will use Do Not Disturb door hangers that don't fall off the handle with every gentle breeze.

2022

🐦 "Tell us more about the aliens" might be the last bastion of bipartisanship.

2017

❝ One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
— Martin Luther King, Jr
❝ It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
— Isaac Asimov
🐦 Only cowards support the immigration ban. Cowards waste this country. Freedom is dangerous and brave, and would be better spent on families facing real terrorism every day.

2016

❝ I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass
— Jim Harrison
📷 Sharing: Calvin and Dune Calvin and Muad'Dib: Calvin and Hobbes panels with lines from Dune about depriving a man of one hour of his life
❝ the sea was very rough it made me feel sick but i like that kind of stuff; it beats arithmetic
— New Order
🐦 Let's be constructive. Celebrate common ground, identify the cause in our differences, and aim to understand them instead of hate them.
❝ It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety.
— John Steinbeck
❝ We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.
— John Steinbeck
❝ ...there is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
— Antonin Scalia
❝ Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive - it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.
— Kurt Vonnegut

2015

❝ Use Occam’s Razor in interpersonal relations: look for the simplest, most straightforward explanation that assumes the best of everybody. Stay away from people who always have a conspiracy theory involving twisted office politics, unfulfilled Machiavellian ambitions, and unspoken agendas.
— Philip Su
❝ You know, there comes a day in every man's life, and it's a hard day, but there comes a day when he realizes he's never going to play professional baseball.
— Josh Lyman

2014

↩ If you don't have a dog, your neighbor can't poison it.
— Sergey Nikitin
❝ Our quality standards are low. We are looking for work that meets minimal requirements.
— U.S. Patent & Trademark Office manager

2013

❝ A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.
— Thomas Jefferson
🐦 In case anyone asks, my life and safety are not worth trading in your uninterrupted privacy and liberty. I accept the consequences of living in a free society, few as they are.

2012

📷 A good time to be a lawyer Chart: lawsuits in the mobile business, lines between phone and tech companies showing who sued whom
📷 Art, or...? Framed poster of the Futurama "not sure if" meme: Not sure if art or copyright infringement

2008

🎬 The Front Fell Off
Plays from YouTube
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