One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Kurt Vonnegut
"Cold Turkey" (4/10/2004)

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway (1997)

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding (economist)
[source undetermined]

In one way or another, we've always been juiced. When coffee and tea were new in the Western world, they were seen as powerful (and often dangerous) mind- and body-altering substances. The historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has recently argued for a causal link between the rise of British tea-drinking and the burst of physical energy that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Opiated artists and coke-stoked musicians inspire both a tragic sense of damaged lives and a widespread appreciation of their chemically modified imagination and chemically managed psychic pain.

Steven Shapin
"Cleanup Hitters"
The New Yorker (4/18/2005)

Update: I find it amazing that so many of the sites on the Internet which feature quotes, aphorisms and epigrams will give the name of the person responsible for the quote, but absolutely no indication of where it originated! For me, the quote isn't complete until I know the source it came from, so I could (if I cared to) verify the accuracy of the quote by looking it up myself in the original source.

There are probably hundreds of sites which quote the Kenneth Boulding remark about exponential growth, but none of the twenty or so I checked showed where it came from. (And, unfortunately, the quote wasn't listed in any of the dozen or so quote source books I have on my desk.)

Just as it's good policy to check out claims made in e-mail circulars before sending them on to everyone in your address book (usually, a quick visit to Snopes.com is enough to debunk or clarify these), it should also be standard policy to check out a quote and determine its source before it's posted -- or at least indicate that the source can't be found, or that the quote can only be attributed.

(I decided with the Boulding that the very numerous sources which cited the quote with exactly the same wording was an indication that it most probably was said or written by him, which is why I marked it as "source undetermined" instead of "attributed".)

Just one of my pet peeves.