Michael Haneke:

What in people's upbringing makes them willing to surrender their responsibilities?

Emrys Westacott:

The real danger isn't transparency but asymmetry.

James Fallows:

As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not.

Elizabeth D. Samet:

The invocation of veteran status as shorthand for some particular quality or capacity ... seems, among other things, to be a symptom of the current civilian-military gap ...

Matt Richtel:

To these vets, thanking soldiers for their service symbolizes the ease of sending a volunteer army to wage war at great distance -- physically, spiritually, economically. It raises questions of the meaning of patriotism, shared purpose and, pointedly, what you're supposed to say to those who put their lives on the line and are uncomfortable about being thanked for it.

Kyle Steiner:

You know, I didn't have to do shit. I didn't have to go in the army. I didn't have to become airborne infantry. I didn't have to do any of that. But I did, you know?

And, that comment, "you did what you had to do," just drives me insane.

Because is that what God's going to say? "You did what you had to do, good job"? Punch you on the shoulder and fucking say, "welcome to heaven," you know? I don't think so.

Michael Haneke:

The willingness to follow ideological Pied Pipers arises everywhere and in every age. All that's needed are misery, humiliation and hopelessness, and the longing for deliverance swells up. Anyone who promises salvation will find followers, and it doesn't really matter whether theirs is a right- or a left-wing ideology, a political or a religious doctrine of salvation.

Akim Reinhardt:

We build ideas like large, intricate Rube Goldberg contraptions. We're desperate to know that we caught the mouse because we built a proper trap. We're distraught by the prospect that we are the mice and the mice are us and every living thing dies, whether in a trap or in an open field or in the talons of bird or in the wreckage of a car or in a hospital. I don't write this because I'm trying to convince anyone. I don't care if you agree with me or not. Whether you do or don't doesn't matter in the least. Nothing matters. Rather, I write these words because the absence of truth is the only truth I know. Because meaninglessness is the only thing I have. And because today I just can't bring myself to pretend otherwise.