when people ask why Trump or Vance or the MAGAs say or do something awful that seems counterproductive (like doubling down on the childless cat lady thing) I'm always reminded of the frog and scorpion fable that ends with this line:

"I could not help myself. It is my nature."

A quote for JD Vance.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

For true believers everywhere:

     "It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble; it's what you know for certain, but just ain't so." - M. Twain

TomR

“America is a divided nation, between people who love Twain and people who quote him.”

Tom_R said:

For true believers everywhere:

     "It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble; it's what you know for certain, but just ain't so." - M. Twain

TomR

"I never said most of the things I said."

Yogi Berra

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Read this quote and thought it suits the mood.

All models are wrong.  Some models are useful - George Box

“Anyone who can not go into nature and enjoy it without killing, should not be allowed entrance.”-Henrik Ibsen

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." 

attributed to Voltaire.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This quote is attributed to Margaret Mead, an anthropologist and recipient of the Planetary Citizen of the Year Award in 1978. The quote emphasizes the power of a small group of people to create change.

This quote from Albert Einstein has been described as an inaccurate translation but I love it just this way.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

I was going to post a Madison quote but I fell in love with this more poetic piece.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

One of the James Madison quotes that feels right for the moment.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

James Madison

Rissala Polo

A PURE HEART IS YOUR SUPERPOWER- Rissala.

Having a warm heart in a cold world is not innocence–it's defiance. It means you've walked through betrayal, through loss, through fire... & refused to let the world turn you to ice.That kind of purity isn't fragile. It's forged. It's dangerous.

“Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

Morganna said:

“Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

Donald Trump hates dogs. 

Hitler was a vegetarian. 

PDF]

On the Eating of Flesh - Platonic Philosophy

The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago features a 225-foot-tall museum tower, where excerpts from Obama’s 2015 speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches are carved into five-foot-tall concrete letters wrapping around the south and west corners of the building

. The quote reads:
"You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”

PVW said:

A thread for quotes and witticisms pertinent to All Politics.

... and when there are a myriad of threads to choose from ... 

(Error message, and then this post appeared twice ... cue the creepy music.)