Ian Zen

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The Princess Bride
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Blake Crouch
“Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”
Blake Crouch, Recursion

Frans de Waal
“Reprimanded children sometimes can’t stop smiling, which risks being mistaken for disrespect. All they’re doing, though, is nervously signaling nonhostility. This is why women smile more than men, and why men who smile are often in need of friendly relations. One study explicitly looked at this underdog quality of the smile in pictures taken right before matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The photographs show both fighters defiantly staring at each other. Analysis of a large number of pictures revealed that the fighter with the more intense smile was the one who’d end up losing the fight later that day. The investigators concluded that smiling indicates a lack of physical dominance, and that the fighter who smiles the most is the one most in
need of appeasement.”
Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

Frans de Waal
“The human smile derives from the nervous grin found in other primates. We employ it when there is a potential for conflict, something we are always worried about even under the friendliest circumstances. We bring flowers or a bottle of wine when we are invading other people’s home territory, and we greet each other by waving an open hand, a gesture thought to originate from showing that we carry no weapons. But the smile remains our main tool to improve the mood. Copying another’s smile makes everyone happier, or as Louis Armstrong sang: “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”
Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

Titus Gebel
“When looting becomes a way of life for a group in society, over time it creates a legal system that legalizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat,
Economist and Politician”
Titus Gebel, Free Private Cities: Making Governments Compete For You

Kerry McDonald
“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates”
Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

54863 Small Government Book Fan Club — 717 members — last activity Apr 09, 2026 01:38PM
This is a group to bring together libertarians/conservatives/Objectivists who enjoy reading fiction authors expressing that worldview in their work. W ...more
5971 Classical (Laissez-Faire) Liberalism — 815 members — last activity Apr 06, 2026 06:49PM
Including within it neo-liberalism, libertarianism, objectivism, anarcho-capitalism, minarchism, and American conservatism, this classical or "market" ...more
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