Category: quotes

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

G.K. Chesterton

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has… enumerated and identified… more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies… But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

Atul Gawande, Stanford School of Medicine 2010 commencement speech

Read the whole thing on The New Yorker [newyorker.com].

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

Noam Chomsky

Or…

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall

It’s like killing a unicorn with a bomb

lovely5555’s review of the Marvel Comics iPad app.

I don’t eat meat because I wouldn’t want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species, that the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot actually kill.

Tim Rogers in Japan: It’s Not Funny Anymore [kotaku.com]

Oh that’s a good one… I’ll have to use that. Better than the classic I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals, I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.