#110quoting

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The biggest waste of taxpayer dollars on welfare is, ironically, the money we spend on trying to prevent people from getting welfare: for example, every time the government tries to save money by preventing drug users from collecting benefits, enforcing that law ends up costing more than it saves. Studies repeatedly show that welfare recipients use drugs at a lower rate than the rest of the population, because it turns out that drugs are super expensive. This makes the vast majority of the mandatory drug tests given to welfare recipients pointless.

—5 Surprising Insider Facts About Welfare

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You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

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Santa was relaxing in his study, or at any rate, he was trying to relax: Elbowsong the elf was there with him, and kept pestering the great man with questions-- why does the sun have to go down, why can't it be afternoon all the time, what's a migraine and can I have one too, why do you always want to play the quiet game I never win that one.

Journey Into #16, by Tom Russell

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The idea emerges that every person’s illness is somehow their own fault, that it comes from nowhere but themselves: their genes, their addictions, and their inherent human insufficiency. We enter a strange shadow-world where for someone to engage in prostitution isn’t the result of intersecting environmental factors (gender relations, economic class, family and social relationships) but a symptom of “conduct disorder,” along with “lying, truancy, [and] running away.” A mad person is like a faulty machine. The pseudo-objective gaze only sees what they do, rather than what they think or how they feel. A person who shits on the kitchen floor because it gives them erotic pleasure and a person who shits on the kitchen floor to ward off the demons living in the cupboard are both shunted into the diagnostic category of encopresis. It’s not just that their thought-process don’t matter, it’s as if they don’t exist. The human being is a web of flesh spun over a void.

Sam Kriss, "Book of Lamentations" (The New Inquiry)

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Really, the choice was clear. I needed to keep doing this, for the sake of my own sanity. To justify to myself why I could do these things, I needed to do them in a way that helped people.

Lydia Devin, Correspondence From the Goddess

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When the new series fails - and it often does - it at least fails in reasonably complex and nuanced ways, as opposed to ones that are easily diagnosed. And there is a sense in which this is preferable. New mistakes are more exciting than old ones. In many ways, progress, whether material social or otherwise, is a matter of making new mistakes.

Dr. Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum, Time Can Be Rewritten 36 (The Girl Who Never Was)