Leonkap

“The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke. A vintage example, and one that really did occur, is that of P.G. Wodehouse, captured by accident during the German invasion of France in 1940. Josef Goebbels’s propaganda bureaucrats asked him to broadcast on Berlin radio, which he incautiously agreed to do, and his first transmission began:
Young men starting out in life often ask me—“How do you become an internee?” Well, there are various ways. My own method was to acquire a villa in northern France and wait for the German army to come along. This is probably the simplest plan. You buy the villa and the German army does the rest.
Somebody—it would be nice to know who, I hope it was Goebbels—must have vetted this and decided to let it go out as a good advertisement for German broad-mindedness. The “funny” thing is that the broadcast landed Wodehouse in an infinity of trouble with the British authorities, representing a nation that prides itself above all on a sense of humor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“The Devil can strip a human being, doomed to be confined to non-person and nonentity, of their memory. By losing their memory, people become incapable of any critical questioning of themselves and the world around them. By losing the powers of individuality and association, they lose their basic moral and political sensibilities. Ultimately, they lose their sensitivity to another human being. The Devil, who safely lurks in the most destructive forms of modernity, deprives human beings of the sense of their place, home, memory and belonging.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity

“To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances.”
― Robert Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance

“Studying biases can in fact make you more vulnerable to overconfidence and confirmation bias, as you come to see the influence of cognitive biases all around you—in everyone but yourself. And the bias blind spot, unlike many biases, is especially severe among people who are especially intelligent, thoughtful, and open-minded.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies