"Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most powerful force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you."
"The average person doesn’t get very far into the details of whatever belief system he/she swallows. You can tell this by asking him or her to explain what he/she believes and why. The vast majority of people cannot provide anything resembling a coherent, comprehensive, and rational defense of their beliefs. At best they can parrot a few arguments they heard in church, school, on the street, or wherever, but these tepid jabs virtually never amount to a serious analysis of alternative points of view. And yet even though they know they can’t explain what they believe, they stay locked in to their beliefs anyway."
"Do we want to heat up gigantic buildings, or just heat the bodies that are in them? Do we want to illuminate our surroundings, or just enable ourselves to see? (The two are not equivalent, since only the barest fraction of reflected light actually reaches our retinae.) Do we want to move vehicles, or occupants? Do we want to move people, or the information in their brains/nervous systems? Do we want to decorate the house, or do we want pleasant patterns of light to reach our eyes? Do we want to build libraries full of books, or do we want access to the information in them? Often, when we discover what we are really trying to do (as opposed to what we find ourselves actually doing) we see room for orders-of-magnitude in efficiency gains."
"Everybody disrespects someone. We live in a finite world in which diverse people with conflicting interests compete for various kinds of insufficient resources. More plainly:no matter who you are, someone poses a real threat to your interests. You aren’t going to respect that person any more than you respect a mosquito that is trying to suck your blood."
