David Wong
New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It's all about how people choose to use it.Collection: Good
After being raised as an evangelical Christian, I for years assumed that Christianity was the default - there were Christians, and then there were weirdos. I was shocked when, in college, I found that some people get offended when you tell them, for instance, that their recovery from surgery was a 'miracle.'
We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.
The reason why Hollywood cranks out so many sequels and adaptations is because the audience is so overwhelmed with choices, the only way to get them in the theater is to give them something familiar.
There are the people who read my horror novels - the first two of them - and they found them scary or whatever, and then there are some people who are maybe not entirely stable who think that they're real, who think that they're being stalked by the same demons or ghosts that are mentioned in the books.
For those of us who aren't great with people, we figure that silence is always the safest bet. If you're an introvert, you spend so much of your time wishing that other people would just shut the hell up that you figure you're doing everyone a favor.
Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.Collection: Jesus
But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.Collection: Two
What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.Collection: Believe
Start working on whatever you hesitate Because there is an ending to every beginning. When you make it to the end, You will realize the hesitation was a waste of time.Collection: Motivational
That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That's what makes a person a dumbass, folks.Collection: Choices
... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.Collection: Wind
I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.Collection: Moving
Cynicism does not cause inaction.Collection: Doe
Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.Collection: Life
You're the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.Collection: Men
If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?Collection: Hate
Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don't?Collection: Doors
The man walked past me and stopped, observing the blood running down my neck. "Your injury. Let us tend to it." He looked out through the open doorway and silently gestured to someone out there. "Our world," he said, "is far more advanced than yours. For reasons you'll understand shortly." A thin, bony, naked woman entered the room, carrying two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left. "There," said the large man. "The kittens will make your sad go away.Collection: Running
He whipped the chair around and actually split one of the things in half with the impact, spilling the spray of blood that was reflective, like mercury. John bellowed, "Anyone else want to donate blood to chair-ity?" He ducked into the the door and bashed one monster right in the wig, screaming, "There's some dessert! With a chair-y on top!Collection: Impact
They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.Collection: Dark
You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose. Space is a puff of smoke, a wisp of cloud.Collection: Ocean
Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.Collection: Falling In Love
Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?Collection: Fighting
People come to have different moral beliefs because they have different non-moral beliefs about relevant facts. People are disposed to believe whatever justifies the practices and institutions that benefit them. But I argue that not all moral differences can be explained away in such a fashion. Some of the most profound disagreements come from differences in priority assigned to values such as relationship and community on the one hand, and individual rights and personal autonomy for the individual, on the other hand.Collection: Fashion
Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.Collection: Serious
The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?Collection: Powerful
We depend for so much on those we love that of course we want them to have desirable personal qualities and to believe that we do too. But if we pin our love for another, and theirs for us, based on personal qualities, it confers an unacceptable conditionality and substitutability on love: we don't want to be exchanged for a better model of whatever our lovers deem to be desirable, so there is a strong tendency to want: to be loved for no reason at all, simply be loved.Collection: Strong
Learning what it is to be among other human beings includes learning that they can be different from us as well as similar. We imagine what it would be like to experience the world differently from their locations, nor our own. We might still use analogies to understand others, but analogies point to similarities that co-exist with differences. Similar in some respects is consistent with different in other respects.Collection: Different
In fact, our need to feel like big shots keeps us wedded to inadequate perspectives on the world, keeps us from exploring and dealing with what doesn't fit into those perspectives. We should be trying to formulate a bigger, richer perspective to accommodate what doesn't fit, but no matter how beautiful and true that new perspective looks to us, we should always be prepared to acknowledge that it doesn't accommodate something we haven't yet confronted.Collection: Beautiful
Guys like him, the ones who grip the Bible so tight they leave fingernail grooves, they're the ones who are the most scared of their dark side. Always going too far the other way, fighting for the Lord, often just because it gives them an excuse to fight.Collection: Fighting
Let's say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don't worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you're the one who shot him.Collection: Home
Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.Collection: Welcome
Here’s exclusive Channel 5 video of a local man having his brain eaten by a winged gremlin. Local gremlin experts warn that—Collection: Men
I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kill a man in a movie by grabbing his head and twisting it until the neck broke. Was that difficult? Could a man do it without a lot of practice?Collection: Men
You see, Frank found out the hard way that the dark things lurking in the night don’t haunt old houses or abandoned ships. They haunt minds.Collection: Dark
The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it'll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean." "Who's-" "Because you're gay.Collection: Real
John's old Caddie had a huge engine that would qualify as a human rights violation if built today. It roared down the road, chugging gas and farting a blue cloud of dinosaur souls.Collection: Clouds
And, well, that's my story," I said. "I'm sorry that it's so, you know. Retarded.Collection: Sorry
The phrase 'sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist' suddenly flew through my mind.Collection: Mind
We know that global capitalism, and the commercially driven culture that comes with it, can be a powerful solvent, but many of us who benefit from it economically can regret the effect it has on our own lives as well as on the lives of others, and we should not view ourselves as helpless in the face of an irresistible force, especially since we may very well be complicit. We should be prepared to help others or to leave them be to sustain their cultures if we judge that they are of intrinsic value or of value to their members.Collection: Powerful
I am sympathetic to the general form of Aristotle's view: the exercise of complex and more inclusive abilities is not anything in itself that is or necessarily should be valued over simple and less inclusive abilities. Rather, value depends on what the abilities are and the ends to which they are put.Collection: Exercise
No. He says when you're dealing with any kids of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they're real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he's being read about and that you're somebody he may have to deal with. And I'm thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that." "What 'I' did? What about us? We were both there." "Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.Collection: Real
My melon soul Crushed by your Gallagher of apathyCollection: Soul
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.Collection: Mad
You know if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?Collection: Shoes
Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing.Collection: Children
I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.Collection: Fate
Both sameness and difference are issues for us. A sign of cultural homogenization is that languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. I am heartened by signs that some peoples are fighting back, e.g., the revitalization of the language of the Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. But if we reject essentialism about culture, we will be cautious about overgeneralizing about what homogenization is and to what degree it exists. If we think of cultures as dynamic, internally diverse and contested, we will be aware that what looks like homogenization may be deeper down this more complicated thing.Collection: Fighting
There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they're standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe?Collection: Feelings