Captain Obvious Aesop/Quotes

You have to admire the people who sing [protest] songs, it takes a certain amount of courage to get up... and come out in favor of the things everyone else in the audience is against. Like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.

—Tom Lehrer, "Folk Song Army"

The general feel of artsyness makes me think Velvet Assassin is trying to make a point, but I'm not sure what that point is. Possibly that the Nazis were bad? Yeah, we figured that out around the Normandy Landings.

—Yahtzee, Zero Punctuation

Time after time, Hollywood just peddles out movies like The Pianist and The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas - all offering the groundbreaking moral that the Holocaust was bad!

—Overhead rant on Oscar Bait.

The lesson here is obvious: Don't hold loaded guns in exploding rooms.

—The Announcer, MythBusters

After Stalin's death, especially after XX Party Congress, a multitude of antistalinists appeared in Soviet Union. [...] If antistalinism of Khrushev era still deserved some leniency since destalinization of the country was underway, antistalinism of Gorbachev era deserves nothing but scorn. Everything is good in its season. I consider real antistalinists only those who rebelled against stalinism while this was deadly dangerous.

—A.Zinoviev, The Russian Fate: The confession of a dissident

So, you know, the lesson here is you should store your rocket fuel in good, sturdy containers. Did you really need us to tell you that?

—Cracked, 6 Tiny Mistakes That Caused Apocalyptic Explosions

And Ken Russell has really done it this time. He has stripped the lid of respectability off the Ursuline convent in Louden, France. He has exposed Cardinal Richelieu as a political schemer. He has destroyed our illusions about Louis XIII. We are filled with righteous indignation a we bear witness to the violation of the helpless nuns; it is all the more terrible because, as Russell fearlessly reveals, all the nuns, without exception, were young and stacked.
It is about time that someone had the courage to tell it like it was about Loudon, a seemingly respectable provincial town beneath the facade of which seethed simmering intrigues, unholy alliances, greed, fear, lust, avarice, sacrilege, and nausea. The story has gone untold for too long. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it, and John Whiting wrote a play about it, but only Ken Russell has made a movie about it.
[...]
I don't know about anyone else, but frankly, I left the Cinema Theater feeling like a new, a different, and, yes, a better person. [...] It took courage for me to go see The Devils, just like it took courage for Ken Russell to make it.

—Roger Ebert, review of The Devils

Virtue without courage is an aberration: in fact you see cowards endorsing a public face of “virtue” as defined by the mainstream media, because they are afraid of doing otherwise.
[…]
The best virtue requires courage; accordingly it needs to be unpopular. If I were to describe the perfect virtuous acts, it would be to take currently frowned upon positions, those penalized by the common discourse (particularly when funded by lobbyists).

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Merchandising of Virtue (Excerpts from Skin in the Game)