What I found in my preliminary investigation is that writing is an often unsatisfying process even more fraught with error.” “Fuck yeah.”

“Well this is the last stage of the experiment, during which the rat is receiving random electrical shocks of random intensities. You see, initially the rat was in control of its environment. By pressing the green lever it could supply itself with food pellets. If it pressed the red lever it was shocked. Once the rat learned this setup, we switched

Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It’s part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don’t notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don’t get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between

Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption within them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses.

What notion could be more possessed of verisimilitude or intractability than that of varying abilities among humans? Given that, assigning numbers to what had theretofore been the highly nebulous and abstract concept of intelligence was beautiful in its simplicity and inevitability. With this act the competition was joined. And what timing too.

Man is only being operated correctly when oriented exclusively toward his benefit and survival. Everything else is nonsense designed to create the very misery you’re talking about. The misery doesn’t come from a failure of benevolence, it stems from its very opposite. What eats at people is their impotence not their selfishness.”

What was needed was an expression for just going to work out of force of habit.

“I’m in control here Toom. Things don’t happen to me. They happen because of me.

“Great, let’s review. You’re willing to come along on the heist but only if we go into an apartment where an extremely high-level drug deal is about to go down, completely unarmed, at precisely the moment the deal is to be consummated, so that the mule, who we don’t know, can’t be blamed, and take about fifteen million dollars and drugs worth seven