Kat Timpf Quotes

The Bottom Line: When you say that words are violence, you inherently are saying that violence is an acceptable response to words, because violence is universally considered an acceptable response to violence.

If we really want people to be on the side of love and acceptance, we have to be willing to love and accept them even after they’ve made mistakes.

Hearing something awful can suck, but the best answer to speech you don't like is always to respond to it with...your own speech.

Plus, there's this: Without forgiveness, comedy just can't exist. Mistakes are inevitable when it comes to comedy.

In 2011, two studies out of Stanford University showed that comedy was a more helpful tool than solemnity in helping participants deal with traumatic imagery.

A better standard would be intention. If someone says something that offends us - but their intentions was humor - than we should respond far differently to that than we would if the person intended to be cruel.

To me, it’s more important to live in a culture wherein a person, any person, doesn’t have to worry that his or her attempt at communication or humor will result in the complete annihilation of their entire life.

The Mayo Clinic, for example, claims that laughing has a whole host of physical benefits—ranging from pain relief to organ stimulation to a stronger immune system—so the last thing we should do is make people too afraid to make the jokes that can elicit it.

There’s also this: When you apologize because you Feel Like You Have To, there’s a pretty good chance that your apology isn’t going to come off as genuine. That’s the thing about acting like a fake-ass bitch: sometimes people happen to notice that you’re being a fake-ass bitch.

Going through something difficult can be an incredibly isolating experience, but it would be far less so if we could all just talk to one another without the fear of doing it wrong. Candor and comedy really do connect us as humans, and it depresses me to think of how much connection we might be missing out on because people are too afraid to try.

If we condition our culture to believe that any joke that upsets any person demands a groveling, on-the-floor apology, then we are going to get exactly what we asked for-fewer jokes, less honesty, and a really unforgivingly low fuckup threshold for ourselves. Also, if what you're looking for from an apology is for people to actually forgive you, then you might be extremely disappointed.

The fact that the government is allowed to steal my money and incarcerate me if I don't comply, so that they can use if for whatever it feels like-like a good-for-nothing study, or an anti-vaping campaign, or a war-is infuriating. They take our money to spend on wars that they lie to us about, and then gaslight us whenever we happen to notice that they've been lying, and then they do it again.

Which brings me to something that religion seems to do better than comedy: forgiveness

Every time I see some Internet moron confidently declare that a joke was “offensive” and “not funny”—and that the fact that it was just a joke does not matter—I want to punch a wall. Sometimes I even want to do something more destructive, like reply and involve myself in an Internet argument with idiots, or worse, columnists for Mother Jones.