Tom

“The right-wingers want to stop the clock entirely, you know, and one of these times they’ll make it. Then the pendulum won’t come back at all. That’s what Orwell was talking about.”
― Timothy J. Culver, Ex Officio

“The single biggest lesson of the whole Snowden fiasco is that America's own sloppiness made it vulnerable: whether to misguided whistleblowers, saboteurs or foreign spies is secondary. The intelligence agencies and their political and judicial overseers also need to do a much better job of explaining what they do and why.”
― Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster

“I’m naturally kind of shy. But being a reporter”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Big Money, Small Town: A Ryan Tapia Novel

“Marcel had heard people describe empty galleries as being eerie, spooky, somehow lesser for the absence of people. Personally, he found that to be utter drivel. While he knew better than to say it out loud, galleries looked so much better to him without people wandering around, cluttering up the place, gawping at things. He knew the official message was that art must be brought to the public and the public must learn to appreciate art, et cetera, et cetera. He toed the party line but, deep down, all that was nonsense to him. Art existed because he saw it and it was good because he said it was. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but why must we pretend all opinions are equal? He had worked so very hard, fought tooth and nail, to get where he was today – a curator at the Louvre. That meant he knew better. Knowing better was almost in his job title.”
― Caimh McDonnell, The Family Jewels