Brian Cloutier

“When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word "please", you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which tings really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, on can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu