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41 " Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion. "
― Geoffrey Miller
42 " In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness. "
― ,
43 " In the 21st century men’s tits have not just rivalled but replaced women’s as the touchstone of ‘sexy’ in mainstream pop culture, even when the audience for them is other men. "
― Mark Simpson
44 " There's mainstream pornography--soft-core airbrushed fluff such as Penthouse and Playboy. The folks makin' this stuff do men and their range of desires a disservice; their implication is that anything outside the " big hair, fake tits, tiny waste, no pores, limited body hair" aesthetic is deviant, weird, not normal--and not something that a red-blooded American man would be interested in. The common boys-will-be-boys explanation for porn--that men get turned on visually (in contrast to " feminine" mode of arousal, which is mental and emotional)--is nothing more than an insult, making men out to be Pavlovian dogs who salivate uncontrollably and strain at their trousers upon contact with nudie pictures.Antiporn arguments, however well-meaning, are no better. Folks like Catherine MacKinnon also believe that men are inherently drawn to porn. And to them, porn is by definition violent, suggesting that it's somehow in men's nature to be aroused by hurting others. Furthermore, antipornography activists think that porn leads men to commit violence--as if men have no self-control or capacity to separate fantasy from reality, as if an erection is a driving force that can't be stopped once it's started... The only difference is one of perspective: Antiporn folk believe that male sexuality is always threatening, while men's-magazine editors think it's always fabulous. "
45 " For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn. "
― , Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country
46 " What is success? What does it mean that someone is successful? Success can be different things to different people. For us being successful is a conscious choice to be oneself. Success does not have to be dependent on any external circumstances and rules dictated by the mainstream society. It does not matter where we live and what we possess. When we love and support ourselves unconditionally choosing to be ourselves as much as we can, this is for us, Being Successful. "
― Raphael Zernoff
47 " Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you. "
― M.B. Dallocchio , The Desert Warrior
48 " Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches. So what does all this mean practically? It means that congregations must be conscious of the persistent and ineradicable loneliness that makes a person seek communion, with other people and with God, in the first place. It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling shit. It means that liberal churches that go months without mentioning the name of Jesus, much less the dying Christ, have no more spiritual purpose or significance than a local union hall. It means that we -- those of us who call ourselves Christians -- need a revolution in the way we worship. This could mean many different things -- poetry as liturgy, focused and extended silences, learning from other religious traditions and rituals (this seems crucial), incorporating apophatic language. But one thing it means for sure: we must be conscious of language as language, must call into question every word we use until we refine or remake a language that is fit for our particular religious doubts and despairs -- and of course (and most of all!) our joys. "
― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
49 " Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal. "
― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
50 " Richard Dawkins regards faith as an evil to be eliminated; he takes all religious faith to be blind faith. (Dawkins says) ‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’ However, taking Dawkins own advice we ask: where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence? Mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed, that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God ,‘ Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So that men are without an excuse.’ Dawkins’ definition of faith turns out to be the direct opposite of the biblical one. Curious that he does not seem to be aware of the discrepancy. "
― John C. Lennox
51 " I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and itinspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. "
― Philip K. Dick , The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 1: The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
52 " I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either. "
― Robert J. Sawyer
53 " Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century. "
― Walter Mosley
54 " As I learned more about choice, and looked over the extensive evidence in all of the cases I had testified in, I realized that what was happening in the FLDS was human trafficking-both for labor and for sex. In mainstream society, money and lust are the currency. In the FLDS, salvation and position are the currency, but the forced acts of labor and sex are the same-the very definition of slavery. And whether greed or God is the currency, it is not right to own another's free agency. "
― Rebecca Musser , The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice
55 " The mainstream media in America has become an insidious device of ignorance. They not only shape the story, but now participate. For what? "
― Jonathan Heatt
56 " In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world. "
― Jo Walton , What Makes This Book So Great
57 " You have two choices in life: you can dissolve into the mainstream or you can be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no one else but you can be. "
― Alan Ashley-Pitt
58 " Where did that remark come from? Mormonism, as anyone can easily find out, is one of a number of Christian sects which came into being in the USA in the nineteenth century. It differs from mainstream Christianity on certain technical points which Dawkins would at least pretend not to understand. So why write " four if you count Mormonism" ? Why not " five if you count Mormonism and Christian Science" ? Or " ten if you include Mormonism, Christian Science, Christedelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Reformed Judaism, Shi'ite Islam, Strict Baptists, Celtic Orthodox, Unitarians and Quakers?" Does Dawkins think that the Mormons' adoptionist Christology is so far removed from the mainstream as to constitute a separate faith (while the Jehovah's Witnesses' arianism is not?) Or is he playing a numbers game, saying that the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints is so numerous as to count as a religion in its own right, distinct from " Christianity" . (But then, why not " Four if you include Catholicism" ?) We never find out. Like Melchizidec, it comes from nowhere and it goes nowhere. It popped into Dawkins head and he wrote it down. It makes me doubt whether our author is fully in command of his brief." Four if you include Mormons" . Honestly, you might just as well say " Britain consists of three countries: England, Scotland and Wales – or four if you include Tooting Bec. "
59 " The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms. Religious fundamentalists also develop an exagerrated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feurerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feurerback, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new Atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche , Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work. "
― Karen Armstrong , The Case for God
60 " What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking. "
― Sara Sheridan
