By Harvey Blume

One of the initial shocks I had from the BDSM communities was that everything and anything could be ample enough to turn into a full-blown fetish.
Confessions of a Black Dominatrix

The Church wanted to teach the Copernican and Aristotelian views as rival hypotheses. All Galileo had to do was give the Church a break and say that you could see it that way if you wanted to. He wouldn’t give it a break.
— Adam Gopnik

Marx is a great thinker. But if we never had Marx it would have been even better.
— 77-year-old Vietnamese dissident Nguyen Phuoc Tuong

If cellulite and cleavage can read as sloppy, toned arms are the very opposite. They are appropriate for early risers and Ivy League overachievers – the sexiness of success rather than vulnerability.
— Libby Copeland

The late Leszek Kolakowski — The farewell to philosophy never ends.

For well over a hundred years, a large portion of academic philosophy has been devoted to explaining that philosophy is either impossible or useless or both. The farewell to philosophy never ends.
— Leszek Kolakowski

So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as “that plague.”
— Reza Aslan, Zealot

Listen, I once forced a Wobbly to sit down and talk calmly to a Kropotkinite. It may mean nothing to you but worlds hung in the balance at that particular moment in time.
— Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

Despite his innocent looks, he was capable in complicated situations, ice when things got heated, and deft in the handling of cars.
— George Pelecanos

I’m not who I was since Parkinson’s. And sometimes, I don’t find he first word I’m after. But I’ll take the second word, the third word. I’ll take it because I like new ways of expressing things.
— Martin Cruz Smith

I’ve interviewed war criminals in a half-dozen countries, and it’s always bewildering how the nice old person across from me, so graciously concerned with how much milk I want in my coffee, could have committed atrocities.
— Nicholas D. Kristof

I wish that strife would perish from among gods and humans, / and anger that drives a man mad, though he is wise.
Much sweeter is anger than honey. It drips down into the hearts / of men and it swells there like smoke.
Achilles, The Iliad, Powell translation

Whitey Bulger spent both Christmas Eve 1957 and New Year’s Eve in the psychology ward tripping on LSD.
— Dick Lehr, Gerard O’Neill, Whitey

I get the ball, I throw the ball, and then I take a shower.
— Mariano Rivera