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"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis O. Brandeis (Olmstead vs. United States)

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." -- Thomas Paine

"And its my opinion, and thats only my opinion, you are a lunatic. Just because there are a few hundred other people sharing your lunacy with you does not make you any saner. Doomed, eh?" -- Oleg Kiselev,oleg@CS.UCLA.EDU

First as to speech. That privilege rests upon the premise that there is no proposition so uniformly acknowledged that it may not be lawfully challenged, questioned, and debated. It need not rest upon the further premise that there are no propositions that are not open to doubt; it is enough, even if there are, that in the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy. Hence it has been again and again unconditionally proclaimed that there are no limits to the privilege so far as words seek to affect only the hearers beliefs and not their conduct. The trouble is that conduct is almost always based upon some belief, and that to change the hearers belief will generally to some extent change his conduct, and may even evoke conduct that the law forbids. [cf. Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, 1952; The Art and Craft of Judging: The Decisions of Judge Learned Hand, edited and annotated by Hershel Shanks, The MacMillian Company, 1968.]

"Never face facts; if you do, youll never get up in the morning." -- Marlo Thomas

...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable, challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self. That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in "Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girls observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself, rather than its output. -- Eliot Handelman

"Largely because it is so tangible and exciting a program and as such will serve to keep alive the interest and enthusiasm of the whole spectrum of society...It is justified because...the program can give a sense of shared adventure and achievement to the society at large." -- Dr. Colin S. Pittendrigh, in "The History of Manned Space Flight"

Most people exhibit what political scientists call "the conservatism of the peasantry." Dont lose what youve got. Dont change. Dont take a chance, because you might end up starving to death. Play it safe. Buy just as much as you need. Dont waste time. When we think about risk, human beings and corporations realize in their heads that risks are necessary to grow, to survive. But when it comes down to keeping good people when the crunch comes, or investing money in something untried, only the brave reach deep into their pockets and play the game as it must be played. -- David Lammers, "Yakitori", Electronic Engineering Times, January 18, 1988

"If you can write a nations stories, you neednt worry about who makes its laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time." -- George Gerbner

"The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between a five-dollar bill and a whip deserves to learn the difference on his own back -- as, I think, he will." -- Francisco dAnconia, in Ayn Rands _Atlas Shrugged_