What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.
Eric SchlosserRead
Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the irrational and punitive policies against marijuana use compared to the leniency shown to violent crimes.
Eric Schlosser's quote highlights the absurdity and injustice in the legal system regarding marijuana. It points out how a society can be considered 'insane' when it imposes harsh penalties for minor drug offenses while treating serious crimes with leniency, illustrating a critical disconnect in moral and legal reasoning.
In practice
During a debate on drug reform, this quote could be used to emphasize the need for a rational approach to drug laws.
What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.
The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.
Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.
That a person cannot and consequently will not defend himself, does not yet cast disgrace upon him in our eyes ; but we despise the person who has neither the ability nor the good will for revenge whether it be a man or a woman.
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord.
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