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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem with binary thinking isn't only that it shuts us off from each other personally, or that it allows the government to get away with corruption, but that it can shut us off from being open to solutions or help people just because of their political team. It's more than just the things we lose as individuals; we're also losing as a society by being hesitant to come together and hear each other out. If we did, if we could just realize that a political label or difference of opinion on one issue was no reason to discount a person on everything, we could solve so many of our problems-- or, at the very least, come together and agree to stop bowing the knee to the ruling class, which routinely abuses partisan loyalties and plays us against one another for the sake of gaining and maintaining its own power and control. Of course, I understand that the politicians we elect do have an impact on our lives. But the preoccupation with partisan fighting distracts us from the fact that there's a much better approach to quelling these concerns. To me, there is far too much focus on which specific people we will put into positions of power, and not enough focus on the amount of power that those positions have. Put another way? we shouldn't have to freak out about what might happen if This Guy or That Guy got elected if the people we elected didn't have so much authority over us in the first place.

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.

In general, whenever I hear language from the government that's clearly meant to evoke fear, I ask myself two questions: Who or what does the government want me to be afraid of? And what do they gain if they succeed?

Put another way: I don't know what's going to happen on Election Day, other than the fact that the election won't be the only thing I'm thinking about- as November 5, 2024, also marks the ten-year anniversary of the death of my mother: a milestone so striking, it seems impossible to me even as I write it. And guess what? I won't be the only person in this country with something else on my mind that day, either.

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

In any case, Fox News is the place that’s given me a platform to share my own views as a nonpartisan thinker, including the importance of not hating people based on a differing political view or alliance.

Additionally, multiple studies from Harvard University found that trigger warnings are, at best, useless, and might even cause further harm to people experiencing trauma. Yet people still use them, and even shame others for neglecting to do so. We are doing ourselves a huge disservice by ignoring all of this—because candid communication and humor are more than just excellent coping mechanisms. They’re also amazing tools for bringing us together.

Meaning: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. . .

John Updike,