The Core

Theresa and I both got some laughs out of that, especially #11, which I feel deeply. But #3 and #5 remind me of Edna Saint-Vincent Millay's poem Grown-Up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?

On a forum:

I am not affraid of robots and AI.

I am affraid of robots and AI in the hands of evil people.

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point."
  -- CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942) ch. 29

"When I was a slave I tried praying for three years. I prayed that God would emancipate me, but it was not till I prayed with my legs that I was emancipated."
  -- Frederick Douglas, 1876.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/11/23/pray-legs/

"It is said that on the night he died, Victor Hugo wrote in his diary, substantially this sentiment: Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come."
  -- Everett Dirksen in his 1964 speech on the Senate floor asking for cloture on the Civil Rights Act, a speech that was essential to passing that Act, bringing in 27 Republican votes to help Lyndon Johnson counteract the Southern Democrats who were tooth and nail opposed to the legislation
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/DirksenCivilRights.pdf

The actual Hugo quote is much less moving and is not from his diary. It is from "Histoire d'un crime," an account of the coup attempt of Louis Bonaparte where he says, simply, "On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées." ("You can resist the invasion of armies; you cannot resist the invasion of ideas," speaking specifically of the ideas of the French Revolution and the still existing monarchical rule of most of Europe).
"https://www.google.com/books/edition/Histoire_d_un_crime_d%C3%A9position_d_un_t%C3%A9/sg_LUe0qqZoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=inauthor%3A%22Victor%20Hugo%22%20intitle%3A%22histoire%22&pg=PA331&printsec=frontcover

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

  — Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow

Warning: politics (sort of)

"You only get two choices in our system, so we chose the red team. The quick version is that partisan politics prevented us from achieving the thing that motivated us to get involved in politics in the first place — helping people by removing barriers. I was slow to react to this fact, letting us head down the wrong road for the better part of a decade. Boy, did we screw up. What a mess!"
  -- Charles Koch

>>Front Fell Off

Funny!

I use versions of that all the time.

I spent half my life wandering around lost in the mountains....
I spent half my life with my nose buried in books...
I spent half my life reading articles posted by rcjordan...