The check is not in the mail.
He won’t respect you in the morning.
Hard work and sacrifice may not, in fact, get you anywhere.
Everybody dies, including you.
Your boss is more concerned with how much work he or she can get out of you than your physical, emotional or economic well-being.
The stock market is a casino that has virtually no relationship to the economy.
There is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or tooth fairy.
Your suffering has no purpose; it is not redemptive and there is nothing to be learned from it.
Pretty much everybody, given the opportunity to do something illegal or immoral with a reasonable expectation of not getting caught, will do it. This is not a romantic gesture against the confining strictures of society; it’s a slap in the face of everybody who tries to live a legal and moral life.
Television is rotting your brain. Watching it is wasting your precious life.
Your life is only precious to you; otherwise, it is astonishingly cheap.
Might does make right. The little guy almost never triumphs (except on television).
Romance does not last. People change and grow apart. Relationships are work.
Your parents had sex, probably with other people as well as each other. Your teenage children are probably having sex.
Politicians are only interested in a common goal to the extent that it can further their dreams of power. Politicians lie to further their own ends. Union leaders lie to further their own ends. Corporate bosses lie to further their own ends. Journalists lie to further their own ends.
That dress does make your body look fat. That hair weave does not look natural.
Most technological progress has not made our lives demonstrably better.
The Earth is getting warmer, and human pollution is primarily to blame.
If you dedicate yourself more to it, your work does not get more interesting.
Foreign aid is frequently selfishly, not altruistically motivated.
They hate you because your government has done and continues to do terrible things in many parts of the world, not because they hate some abstract notion of freedom or Britney Spears. You do not know this because you choose not to know what your government does in your name in the rest of the world.
Governments of all political stripes and persuasions reward their friends when they get into power.
Marijuana is not essentially harmful to your health and does not necessarily lead to the use of harder drugs. In fact, the most frequently abused and socially harmful drug, by far, is alcohol. The war on drugs is failing, jut as Prohibition ultimately failed, but it’s causing a lot of needless suffering and making criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.
There is no “crisis” in Canadian health care, just a shortage of funds that has predictably led to cutbacks in services. Privatization will not make things better, except for the wealthy; injecting more public funds into the system will.
Deregulation and privatization do not automatically lead to better prices or better products and services.
Canada is a nation of immigrants; the majority of citizens are either immigrants themselves or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Immigrants have, for the most part, worked hard and contributed greatly to this country. Making it harder for people to immigrate is usually racially motivated and always ultimately self-defeating.
Buying a specific brand of car or drinking a specific brand of beer will not get you the kind of girlfriend you want. Getting breast implants or going on a diet will not get you the kind of boyfriend you want (but it will often make you sick).
Nice guys really do finish last.
None of the senior managers of Enron, WorldCom or any other major corporation is going to watch a sunrise from a prison cell. If you steal a loaf of bread, expect a fine and possibly some jail time; if you steal a loaf of bread three times, you can expect to find yourself in jail for many, many years. If you perpetrate a fraud that causes thousands of employees to lose their jobs and thousands of others to lose their life savings, you can expect a stern lecture from President George W. Bush. It’s true – the law doesn’t apply to the rich.
The American Empire is on the decline and will, in time, end. Not to worry, though: the Asian Empire that succeeds it won’t last forever, either.
The universe doesn’t care.
Sorry for having to be the one to break the news to you.