Aphorisms serve me as a substitute for serious thought.
There is no reason why we should not feel ourselves free to be bold, to be open, to experiment, to take action, to try the possibilities of things. Over against us, standing in the path, there is nothing but a few old gentlemen tightly buttoned up in their frock coats, who only need to be treated with a little friendly disrespect and bowled over like ninepins.
— John Maynard Keynes
After bread, education is the first need of the people.
— Georges Danton
Woman? Well, maybe—but I was a Grown-
Up, entitled to make up my own
mind, manners, morals, myths—menses small price
to pay for midnight and my own advice.
— Marilyn Hacker, “Peterborough”, Assumptions
to work at re-inventing work and love.
We may be learning how to tell the truth.
— Marilyn Hacker, “La Fontaine de Vaucluse”, Assumptions
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muß man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, §7
They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Block by block he hurried through the darkening city. Struggling to get back as soon as possible to the fixed, comprehensible place he had been.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.
— Isaiah Berlin
Whoever has learnt to be anxious in the right way, has learnt the ultimate.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.
— Edward Tufte, The Social Dilemma
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.
— Sophocles, Antigone
Experience makes fools of us all. In experiencing so much and growing older, I’ve realised there was definitely a naivety to my former self. There was a hopefulness, joyfulness and playfulness to a lot of those early records that’s been slowly receding over the years. It’s hard for me to speak for it because it’s happened so gradually, like watching a tree grow. But you start to lose faith in the structures of society as you get older, and I think that’s coming to the surface now.
— Sufjan Stevens, The Guardian
None are more helplessly enslaved than those who believe they are free.
— Juliet Gilkes Romero, The Whip
You rise, because you cannot subvert your neighbour’s liberty without attacking your own.
— Juliet Gilkes Romero, The Whip
You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?
— Steven Wright, The Guardian
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
— A.J. Liebling, The Guardian
London, long since the natural home of everyone who owned the world but didn’t live in China…
— William Gibson, The Peripheral
As a rule, it was the fittest who perished. The misfits,
Forced by failure to migrate to unsettled niches,
altered their structure and prospered.
— W.H. Auden, Robert Newman
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
— Blaise Pascal
Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
While we talk the years will sneak away.
Distrust that ripe tomorrow: pluck the day.
— Quintus Horatius Flaccus, “Odes”, Book I, Ode xi
Broadly speaking, ours is a society of altruists governed by psychopaths.
— George Monbiot, The Guardian
I feel like, a hundred years ago, America gave us a safe word – and we’ve simply forgotten it.
— Frankie Boyle, Hurt Like You’ve Never Been Loved
Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis, ut cito dicta percipiant animi dociles teneantque fideles: omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat.
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men’s minds may take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
— Quintus Horatius Flaccus, “Ars Poetica”, l.335-7
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
— Frederick Douglass
Abstractions are defined by thinkably few relationships among thinkably few entities.
— Tracy Harms, Jsoftware conference 2014
Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us.
— Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts 1959-2004
Individuals who never sense the contradictions of their cultural inheritance run the risk of becoming little more than host bodies for stale gestures, metaphors and received ideas, all the stereotypic likes and dislikes by which cultures perpetuate themselves.
— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, myth and art
The agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for.
— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, myth and art
People feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.
— Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What we’ve learned – and have still to learn – from the financial crisis
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
— R. Buckminster Fuller
A large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas.
— William James
I’ve stopped reading the newspapers. Now I just lie to myself and cut out the middleman.
— Frankie Boyle, link
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
— H.L. Mencken, “Life or death”, David Edwards, openDemocracy, 2014-12-15
The difference between dreaming and being awake is just that at night, consciously, you stop doing anything else. I have to be awake and go around, be a properly dressed person, every day, but actually only just enough to eat and make a few friends. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m dreaming all the time. The only difference is that I come up for daylight and other people the way a whale has to come up for air.
— Robert Wyatt, “Free Will and Testament: the Robert Wyatt Story”, Calliope Media
I see craftmanship not as an ability to plan campaigns but as being able to jump the right way in all the unguessable emergencies of writing.
— Denise Levertov, Robert Baird in “Exotic bird from Ilford”, London Review of Books, 25 Sep 2014
One cannot really come to appreciate one’s life save by playing with it and hazarding it a little.
— Jack London, James Camp in “In a boat of his own making”, London Review of Books, 25 Sep 2014
There has been no design to my life at all. No plot, no plan. I’ve lived by the skin of my teeth and taking chances at village dances.
— Jean, Baroness Trumpington, Coming Up Trumps, Macmillan, London, 2014
This island is made mainly of coal and is surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.
— Aneurin Bevan, Speech at Blackpool, 1943. In Going South: Why Britain will have a third-world economy by 2014, Larry Elliott & Dan Atkinson, Macmillan Palgrave, London, 2012
as regards wealth, … no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none so poor that he has to sell himself.
— Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Democratic Wealth
The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
— Edward Dowling, William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, Zed Books, London, 2014, p. 319
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
— Noam Chomsky, link
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
— Noam Chomsky, link
We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, link, Courtesy
The education that has been given to the people is at most partial and second best, and has little in common whether in range or spirit with the universal education that may be. It was but the least possible with which the people would be contented, and it was calculated to equip not citizens, but servants… But education has to fit us for something… so incomparably precious that it will save a man from being a mere unit, a cipher: it will give him a life of his own, independent of the machine. And therefore at any cost our education must never sink to the level at which it will be merely vocational.
— Cyril Norwood, headmaster of Harrow School, Ian Irvine in “The way we were’, Prospect, April 2014
Ignorance, or the want of knowledge and literature, the appointed lot of all born to poverty and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of infusing that insensibility, which can enable them to endure the miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial, administered by the gracious hand of providence, of which they ought never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the basis of all subordination, the support of society, and the privilege of individuals… by which means the prince and the labourer, the philosopher and the peasant, are, in some measure, fitted for their respective situations.
— Soames Jenyns, MP, Ian Irvine in “The way we were’, Prospect, April 2014
Genius lies in limitation.
— Goethe
Nothing more than memory is left of the old Anglo-German antagonism.
— Sir Edward Grey, Vernon Bogdanor, “Sir Edward Grey and the crisis of 1914”, lecture at The Legatum Institute, London 26 Sep 2013, per BBC Parliament
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed and well-fed.
— Herman Melville
The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied. Nobody can persuade owners to share with makers when makers won’t shift for themselves.
— Alasdair Gray, “Man is the pie” by Jenny Turner, review of “Every Short Story 1951–2012” by Alasdair Gray, in London Review of Books, 21 February 2013
You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. But leaders are the effects, not the causes, of changes.
— Alasdair Gray, “Man is the pie” by Jenny Turner, review of “Every Short Story 1951–2012” by Alasdair Gray, in London Review of Books, 21 February 2013
If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
— Jane Austen
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
— Cora Harvey Armstrong
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. … Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
— Howard Zinn
You can live two lives but not three.
— Nigella Lawson
Love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.
Sit in meditation for twenty minutes a day – unless you’re too busy, in which case, sit for an hour.
It is poor civic hygiene to install the machinery of repression in the belief that it will never be used.
The Wright brothers learned more about flying in 12 seconds than mankind had done in the previous two millennia.
I believe that men and nations can live in peace and harmony – when they’ve tried everything else.
Organised people are just too lazy to look for things.
The best is the enemy of the good.
Until the lion learns to write the hunter will always tell the story of the hunt.
Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Smile a lot, it relaxes yourself and others. And dance like no one’s watching.
When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.
— Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: His life, his times and the birth of modern nations
When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of happiness’; when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second
The spirit of society, and the inequality which society produces … is contrary to the laws of nature … that the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the basic necessities of life.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
When in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong with the system of government.
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second
A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor.
— David Hume, Of Commerce
Boys do now cry “Kiss my Parliament” instead of “Kiss my arse,” so great and general contempt is the Rump come to among all men, good and bad.
— Samuel Pepys, Diary
Every orientation presupposes a disorientation. Only someone who has experienced bewilderment can free himself of it. But these games of orientation are in turn games of disorientation. Therein lies their fascination and their risk. The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it will stray and get lost. But the labyrinth also poses the visitor a challenge: that he reconstruct the plan of it and dissolve its power. If he succeeds, he will have destroyed the labyrinth; for one who has passed through it, no labyrinth exists.
— Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Topological Structures in Modern Literature”, Sur, Buenos Aires, May-Jun 1966
What woman wakes up of a morning and says “Today I do not want to be swept off my feet?”
— Kevin Bisch, Hitch
Software design is a constant battle with complexity.
— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design
It is not that we misunderstand each other, that we keep getting it wrong, it is that we put so much belief – false belief – in the whole notion of knowing and understanding
— Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
— Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize acceptance speech
The strong take from the weak; and the smart take from the strong.
— Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cats Cradle
Our love poems are mostly the work of madmen. I laid them at her feet, proudly, as a cat would a half-eaten rat.
— Don Paterson, ”Aphorisms”, London Review of Books
My time here has afforded me no enlightenment; though my night-vision has improved enormously.
— Don Paterson, “Aphorisms”, London Review of Books
On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life – provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings… On the other… – a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.
— Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography
Die Welt ißt alle, das die Falle ißt.
The world is everything that is the case.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Sexual harassment is a crime committed by beta-males who think they can get away with alpha behaviour…
— Jemima Lewis, The Week
Ye are the duped and dormant, damned to the end of things
Motes in the merchant’s ledger, dust in the path of kings.
— anonymous, “Hallelujah lasses”, ES Turner, London Review of Books
Repeat after me: happiness is merely a habit.
— Paddy McAloon, I Trawl The Megahertz
“There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”
— Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
Killing your opponent is the ultimate in conflict resolution.
— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
Was it Romeo or Juliet
Who said when about to die
Love is not all peaches and cream
Goodbye little dream, goodbye?
— Cole Porter, Anything Goes
Poetry is no more a vocation than good health is.
— Robert Bolt, Doctor Zhivago
Rule 4: Always say less than necessary.
— Personal ad, London Review of Books
Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is nothing strange to wonder at and nothing new to exchange.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
Only short programs have a hope of being correct.
— Arthur Whitney
I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 … is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. … I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all.
— Thomas Jefferson
This American world was not made for me.
— Alexander Hamilton
They who feed, cloathe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
— Adam Smith
The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitutions embraced. No one loves armed missionaries.
— Maximilien de Robespierre
From the respect paid to property, as from a poisoned fountain, flow most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene.
— Mary Wollstonecraft
Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
— Rumi
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity.
— Boris Pasternak
We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.
— Marilyn Monroe
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
— Mae West
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
— Adam Smith
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
— Aristotle
Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Let justice be done even if the skies fall.
— Lord Mansfield
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
— Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Bread and water can easily be tea and toast.
— The Teahouse Theatre, Vauxhall
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
— George Bernard Shaw
A nation of sheep soon begets a government of wolves.
— Edward R. Murrow
Poetry is – I fear – incurable.
— Lord Byron
Who would write – who had anything better to do?
— Lord Byron
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
— Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
— Oscar Wilde
One should always be in love; that is the reason one should never marry.
— Oscar Wilde
Only the shallow know themselves.
— Oscar Wilde
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
— Frederick Douglass
If you do not read the newspapers you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.
— Mark Twain
Princes and priests soon saw an enemy in the press. Type was in their opinion the most serious form that lead could take.
— George Jacob Holyoake
I will use Arial when Helvetica freezes over.
— Rocío Rødtjer
Just as science is the religion of the positivists, justice is the religion of the Jew.
— Léon Blum
If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.
— Kurt Vonnegut
It is hard for anyone to become an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
— William Hazlitt
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
— Thomas Paine
If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.
— Tony Judt
The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
— Adam Smith
We shouldn’t leave the job of loving the earth to the mole.
— Dulce María Loynaz (‘Autumn Melancholy’ CXLIII, trans. James O’Connor)
Across the globe we can recognize a common situation, in which gigantic masses of people are abandoned to the banlieues and ghettoes of large cities, and where the old principles of proletarian organization are no longer effective.
— Alain Badiou
The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions of existence that are precarious and chaotic. They are a collective figure that still has no name.
— Alain Badiou
Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
— Alain Badiou
Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds, sometimes only a little bit.
— Willis Harman
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
— C. A. R. Hoare
The things we want to be most private about are what we are stopped by. They are also what makes us connected as human beings.
— The Landmark Forum
The jerk that you are is all you have to work with. The cavalry is not coming. Do you have the jerk or does it have you?
— The Landmark Forum
Standing in the opening that is the verge of breakthrough, who you used to be would know what to do – but it wouldn’t work. Building tolerance for not knowing is mastery.
— The Landmark Forum
Why write – if not to praise the sacred places?
— Richard Howard
…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive … it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
— Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
Nothing could be more remote from Socialist ideals than the competitive scramble of a society which pays lip-service to equality, but too often means by it merely equal opportunities of becoming unequal.
— R.H. Tawney
Whatever the crimes of the Elizabethans, respectability was not among them.
— R.H. Tawney
And so the author vanishes—that spoiled child of ignorance—to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine and will know how this machine works.
— Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
Liberalism is the trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism is distrust of the people, tempered by fear.
— William Ewart Gladstone
Is it not wonderful, sir, that all true constitutional watchfulness of England should be dead to the only real danger that the present day exhibits and they should alone be roused by the idiotic clamour of republican frenzy and popular insurrection, which do not exist? We are come to the moment when the question is whether we should give to the King, that is to the executive government, complete power over our thoughts.
— Charles James Fox
I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a hand upon. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.
— J.B. Books, The Shootist
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
— George Orwell, 1984
All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.
— George Orwell, 1984
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
— George Orwell, 1984
The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take away his job and starve him to death.
— George Orwell
When I became an adult I put away childish things, including the fear of seeming childish and the desire to be very grown-up.
— C.S. Lewis
Pessimism is the luxury of the very rich. It is a real energy drainer.
— Richard Chartres
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
— G.B. Shaw
Don’t ever argue with a fool in a public forum. While you might think you are winning the argument, bystanders might not be able to tell which of you is the fool.
— Philip Emma
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
— Paul Valéry
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
— C. A. R. Hoare
The screwed-up way we approach software development is because of what we have done with programming languages.
— Richard Gabriel
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
— Blaise Pascal
Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?
— Adolf Hitler
Copyright is for losers™
— Banksy
The only real problem with APL is that it is still ahead of its time.
— Morten Kromberg
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped.
— Calvin Coolidge
Civilisation is an exercise in self-restraint.
— W.B. Yeats
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
— Mark Twain
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
— John F. Kennedy
Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.
— Ian Fleming
…the antipathy which every true-born Briton naturally bears to ministers of state
— David Hume
What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
— Thomas Paine
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone might be looking.
— H.L. Mencken
Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t deal with drugs.
— Robin Williams
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for those who do like country music, ‘denigrate’ means ‘put down’.
— Bob Newhart
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.
— Geoffrey Chaucer
The generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.
— John Stuart Mill
Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
— Anatole France
The only response to absolute evil is fraternity.
— André Malraux
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, and those who are cold and are not clothed.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
My house burns with the three fires. It is not fit to live in.
— Gautama Buddha
No individual or people can be so cold, indifferent and insensitive … as those who by their nature are lively, sensitive and warm.
— Leopardi
Let thy speech be short, signifying much in few words.
— Ecclesiastes 23.8
In Cuba the music flows like a river. It takes care of you and rebuilds you from the inside out.
— Ry Cooder
Hope is the power to be cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
— G.K. Chesterton
Many are stubborn in the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men. The other 999 follow women.
— Groucho Marx
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
— Aldous Huxley
When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’
— Don Marquis
TV is trash… poison.
— Madonna
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love each other.
— Jonathan Swift
You make the movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie.
— David Cronenberg
Seems to me the kids are just too darn healthy nowadays… get the same pleasure from flossing their teeth, jogging five miles or fucking and a shower. I mean, doesn’t anybody muffle sobs in pillows anymore? Get dizzy with desire in phone booths?
— Lucia Berlin to August Kleinzahler
Even if the system assigned me a guest-room in the attic, I still prefer to be a thinker who lives like a bird on a twig.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Mead
The trouble with life is, by the time you can read a girl like a book, your library card has expired.
— Milton Berle
Money doesn’t make you happy. The man with ten million dollars is no happier than a man with nine.
— Sign on foreign-exchange trader’s desk at Macquarie Bank, Sydney
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
— Alan Perlis
Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
— Benjamin Franklin
That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
— George Boole
When I get a little money I buy books; if any is left I buy food and clothes.
— Erasmus
APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in any way – even by adding another diamond – you get an ugly kludge. LISP, on the other hand, is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still looks like a ball of mud.
— Joel Moses
Science is like sex; sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
— Richard Feynman
But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract. The easiest program to change is one that’s very short.
— Paul Graham
A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
— Paul Graham
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
— John Cage
I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone – but they’ve always worked for me.
— Hunter S. Thompson
Women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. Someone out there in the Cosmos must be laughing at us.
— Billy Connolly
I know men find intimacy difficult. I have to have a lot of sex with someone before I’ll ask them out for a drink.
— Dylan Moran
Huske at elske, mens du tør det.
Huske at leve, mens du gør det.
Remember to love, while you dare it.
Remember to live, while you do that.
— Piet Hein
Cry Havoc! and let loose the dogs of war.
— William Shakespeare
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
— Marcel Proust
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
— Martin Buber
Weeds are God dancing without our permission.
— Andrew Gaines
I believe people can find true love and happiness, as I did – eventually.
— Richard Curtis
Five years from now you will be exactly the same person you are today … apart from the people you meet and the books you read.
— Charlie “Tremendous” Jones
It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink, and have a sense of humour.
— Elisabeth Charlotte of Orange-Nassau
With me, it’s not a case of having left undone the things I ought to have done; I’ve left undone those things I ought not to have done too.
— Alan Bennett
…and the serene confidence of a Christian with four aces.
— Mark Twain
If ever it shall happen that in the house of the artisan you can turn on power as you can now turn on gas, you will then see men and women able to pursue in their own houses many industries which now require the aggregation of the factory.
— Lord Salisbury
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.
— Cary Grant
Understanding is the booby prize in life.
— David Ure
Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.
— Mark Twain
The masters of the art, it seems to me, are those who never stop apprenticing.
— Robert Bringhurst
Put not your faith in kings and princes. Three of a kind beats them every time.
— P.J. O’Rourke
I believe poetry is indispensable, but to what, I can’t quite say.
— Jean Cocteau
Did you hear about Magda Lupescu
Who came to Romania’s rescue?
It’s a wonderful thing
To be under a king:
Is democracy better, I esk you?
— Unknown, per Bruce Schultz OP
It’s a nervous tic of analytical philosophy to be forever wishing to clarify distinctions that nobody is actually confused about.
— Jerry Fodor
Things which you have lived with tend to seem unproblematical until you change them; then you wonder what on earth you once thought you were doing.
— Stephen Sedley, Lord Justice of Appeal
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
— H.L. Mencken
When I was little I wanted to be somebody. Now I wish I’d been more specific.
— Lily Tomlin
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
— Dorothy Parker
Kindness is in our power; fondness is not.
— Samuel Johnson
Doubt is not a pleasant condition. But certainty is absurd.
— Voltaire
The mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it.
— Aristotle
In a choice between grief and nothing, people will choose grief.
— Jim White, gospel singer
Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry to see you retire.
— Samuel Johnson
I measure my financial success by how little time I spend thinking about it.
— SJT
What mostly stops us in life is stopping to handle what stops us.
— The Landmark Forum
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
— Plato
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
— W.H. Auden
He that lives well in the world is better than he who lives well in a monastery.
— Samuel Johnson
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure,
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
— Marianne Williamson, “Return To Love”
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
— William James
All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
— James Thurber
I’m tired of this back-slapping “Isn’t humanity neat?” bullshit. We’re a virus with shoes, okay?
— Bill Hicks
Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.
— Alasdair Gray
Eat, drink and be merry; for tomorrow we die.
— A fan of merriment
Mors certa est, incerta dies, nec certa sequentum.
Death is certain, but not the day, nor what follows.
— Inscription in York Minster
Life is trouble; only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.
— St Jerome
After forty, every man is responsible for his own face.
— Abraham Lincoln
One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
— Oscar Wilde
No one wants APL but so many want what APL makes possible.
— SJT
Work every day, except play days.
— Brooke Allen
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible.
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
— Albert Camus, Retour à Tipasa
Friends are not made, but recognised.
— Carl Rakosi
I have nothing against abstinence – as long as it does not harm anybody.
— Mark Twain
The only place you can fall from is where it’s at, and when you’re down, you’re not there, that’s why.
— Alastair Howard Robertson
We love the people who make us whole.
— Robertson Davies
A man’s homeland is wherever he prospers.
— Aristophanes
What is to give light must endure burning.
— Viktor Frankl
There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
The world belongs to the energetic.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only short programmers have a hope of being correct.
— Ray Cannon
a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down
— Geoffrey Hill, The Orchards of Zion
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
Not [taking action to address the climate crisis] will leave us in a position where we are—just by inadvertence, by lack of will, by lack of coming together—marching forward in what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact.
— John Kerry, The Economist
… a depoliticisation of politics that is the mark of the current age: that is, the cancellation of any popular agency able to carry or fight for an alternative to a status quo that simulates representative forms the better to empty them of division or conflict
— Perry Anderson, The Peripeteia of Hegemony
The web is structurally engineered to shove a banquet of the dumbest arguments in human history in our faces several times a day.
— Emily Witt, Perseverate My Doxa, London Review of Books
The dark bed, like a gentle pool of water, receives you; you sink down into its encompassing arms, floating down the wandering trail of a dream, as down some straying river that softly twists and slides … now dripping darkly into blind waves, now emerging, lit with the odd phospherescent light of oneiric reason, unsearchable and dark to waking eyes.
— Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures: Essays on enjoying life, London Review of Books
Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity.
— Marshall McLuhan
Freedom is not for the timid.
— Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
Experience is fundamentally illusory. When one is experiencing emotional pain or grief, one feels that everything that happens in life is unreal. And this is a right understanding of life.
— Joy Williams
Every person considered themselves unique as snowflakes but in the aggregate they were a blizzard, a whiteout of swirling expectation and denial.
— Joy Williams
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
— Alan Wilson Watts
Life itself is not a dreadful situation by any means and most of the bad things that happen come because people don’t have respect for one another or are unable to put themselves in the shoes of someone who might be more desperate than you are.
— David Amram
Adventure is the thing when you don’t know what’s going to happen.
— Brooke Allen
Either do something worth writing about or write about something worth doing.
— Brooke Allen
Your job is to have stories for your grandchildren; and the worse it gets, the better the story.
— Brooke Allen
Don’t look for a job; look for work.
— Brooke Allen
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The classic guide to writing nonfiction
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Are you hanging onto something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The classic guide to writing nonfiction
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
— Edmund Burke
Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.
— Rosa Luxemburg
A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.
— Akio Morita
I don’t know. I’m in the forest most of the time. How do I know what the world is? I can tell you what the trees look like.
— Jennifer Beals, Guardian
Forget your readers, forget acknowledgment. Poetry is not about making connections. You don’t need to be understood, you don’t even need to understand yourself. Poetry is only research into the unfathomable.
— Aase Berg, Interview with Paul Cunningham
Only stupid people don’t change their minds.
— Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware of the ultimate results of their activity.
— Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
If you only read one book this year, you should really try reading a few more…
— Tony Parsons
Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.
— Vannevar Bush
The problem is not that there is evil in the world. The problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
— Fargo
There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.
— Chinua Achebe
I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else. (To Stanley Johnson, about his son Boris.)
— Martin Hammond, former headmaster, Eton College
The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task.
— Maria Montessori
Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.
— Vita Sackville-West
Ask them when they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. Want to know something? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll just want us to get it for them.
— James Grady, Three Days of the Condor
The tradition of the camp-fire faces the tradition of the pyramid.
— Martin Buber, Moses
There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveller. Therefore wander!.
— Aitaraya Brāhmana
It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.
— Anatole France
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill … Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
— Søren Kierkegaard, letter to Jette
There is nothing better than a change of air in this malady, than to wander up and down,as those Tartari Zalmohenses, that live in hordes, and take the opportunity of times, places, seasons.
— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Our nature lies in movement, complete calm is death.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
A study of the Great Malady: horror of home.
— Charles Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes
We all have two lives. The second begins when we realise that we only have one.
— Jutta Vinzent
Nor is consensus a useful guide; one further lesson of history is that, in every age, the consensus view of the future is consistently wrong.
— John Michael Greer, Dark Age America
Visitors to a baby ward in hospital are often surprised by the silence. Yet if the mother really has abandoned her child, its only chance of survival is to shut its mouth.
— Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
The market is incapable of respecting a common resource such as the environment, which provides no price signal to express the cost of its erosion nor to warn of the long-term dangers of its destruction.
— Robin Cook
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.
— Groucho Marx
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
— Thucydides
Trauma in a person, decontextualised over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualised over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualised over time, looks like culture.
— Resmaa Menakem
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
— Arthur Miller
Of course we know we’re in a fatal holding pattern; of course we know the cabin crew are running out of ways to keep us entertained.
— Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
— H.L. Mencken
One could easily make a case that the main reason the Soviet economy worked so badly was because they never were able to develop computer technology efficient enough to coordinate such large amounts of data automatically. But the Soviet Union only made it to the 1980s. Now it would be easy. Yet no one dares suggest this.
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A theory
It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A theory
Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A theory
Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and “the economy” is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so.
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A theory
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could we possibly end up with a distribution of labour more inefficient than the one we already have?
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A theory
So there’s one datapoint, surfing. Another would be, quite simply, the existence of women’s breasts. Now we have two datapoints, each of which by itself offers full and sufficient proof that there is a God, and that he loves us very much.
— Matthew B. Crawford, “Can gratitude save humanity?”
Igitur quī dēsīderat pācem, praeparet bellum.
He who desires peace should be ready for war.
— Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De re militaris, III
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
— John Muir
Good organisers listen to people to figure out what they need – and then show them that, through the collective exercise of power, a world in which those needs are met is, contrary to appearances, possible.
— Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books
Ch’an Buddhism added to Indian Buddhism the requirement that everybody work: “a day without work, a day without food.”
— Gary Snyder, The Real Work
The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.
— Gary Snyder, A Place in Space
Creativity draws on wildness, and wildness confers freedom, which is (at bottom) the ability to live in the real physical daily world at each moment, totally and completely.
— Gary Snyder, A Place in Space
This is an oral art. They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.
— Gary Snyder, The Paris Review
What was the future? One answer might be, “The future was to have been further progress, an improvement over our present condition.” This is more in question now. The deep past confounds the future by suggesting how little we are agreed on what is good.
— Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader
What then has coal to do with our race? As far as we know yet, everything.
— John Turnbull Thomson, London Review of Books
I am certain we cannot wait for the storm to pass or seek to skirt around its edges—we must learn to dance in the rain.
— Jem Bendell, Breaking Together
One of the key effects of waking up to the predicament of modern societies is that people with a similar Western upbringing to myself begin to sense how the dominant culture that we accepted or admired is actually ‘omnicidal’—leading to the mass extinction of life on Earth and threatening the survival of our own species. Some people may want to frame this merely as a problem with the oil industry, or profligate elites, but a closer examination leads us beneath that to the ideas we were taught about self, other, nature, reality and progress.
— Jem Bendell, Breaking Together
Our whole culture, our whole civilisation, in so far as it is involved in time and living only for a future, is nuts, it’s not all here. We are not awake, we are not completely alive now.
— Alan Watts
Let us truly live the beauty and responsibility of being a prophetic people.
— Bishop Oscar Romero
Everywhere people ask: ‘what can I actually do?’ The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, put our inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.
— E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
— Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
I feel I have begun to deeply adapt by changing my life plans, including my economic situation, so that I have a better chance of being free to do what I think serves love and truth, without fear or compromise for the rest of this decade. […] I have no plans or wishes for after the end of this decade, as I would be surprised to be alive at that point, due to societal circumstances rather than my own. I hope that during this decade I can continue to share ideas that invite attention to delusions and aggressions that are implanted within us by culture or power and that help rekindle our commitments to - and joy from - courageous loving action.
— Jem Bendell
Leadership often involves helping people to see the limitations of the assumptions and stories that have been offered to us through the culture we live within and by the powerful institutions within our societies. To me, unlearning is as important as learning for adults who have grown up within modern cultures, and therefore whose very tools of thought are shaped by those cultures. To focus only on learning can imply what Paolo Freire called the banking model of education, where people think to add to what we already know. Instead, we can be liberated from prior assumptions.
— Jem Bendell
And what is also certain is that, as multiple globules of Tory turds hit multiple overheating fans in the hottest days ever recorded on Earth, the BBC presenter story absolutely isn’t the main story. But we sit here on our collective sofa, like colostomy bags with clown faces daubed on us in shit, sucking up buckets of queasy filth through straws, bleating our half-understood opinions out on to social media networks that farm us for data like pigs, consuming this calculated crap. We deserve to burn.
— Stewart Lee, The Guardian
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
— Krishnamurti
[On spiritual practice] In the beginning nothing came. In the middle, nothing stayed. In the end, nothing left.
— Milarepa
He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
— Andrew Carnegie
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
— Baruch Spinoza
The urgent challenge facing the world is not to give more to the poor, but to take less from the poor.
— Satish Kumar
There comes a point when we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out who pushed them in.
— Desmond Tutu
…to take more than one’s essential requirements means depriving other people and is theft; to use up finite resources at a greater rate than they can be replenished is stealing from future generations.
— Nguyễn Phương Lam
What were bad harvests
To the need that ravages us in the midst of plenty?
— Bertolt Brecht, On Judging
Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen.
If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen
Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
— James Baldwin
The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
— Antonio Gramsci
The past creates who you are. It shouldn’t be your burden. […] Lower your burden. Run towards new life.
— Kwong-Kim Yip, Tai Chi Master
Capitalism sharpens its tools on the bodies of the most marginalised.
— Dalia Gebrial, BOOMERANG: Empire and Britain’s Economy
So the guidance that the mind
provides to human beings
depends upon the arrangement,
at any given moment, of the shipwrecked limbs.
The basic operations of the body –
in each part and in all parts – aim at the same thing
in every human being. Thought
is whatever is left over.— (Parmenides, Fragment B16)
— Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing
When the rich steal from the poor it’s called business; when the poor resist it’s called violence.
— Mark Twain
This is a world where exploitation passes for innovation, where daylight robbery passes for business. This is a world of suffering and flames, slaving under a master who governs those whose morality crumbled under the pressure of their own desires. This a world without limits.
Welcome to Hell.
— Rachel Donald, Planet: Critical
The cure for death is birth, not immortality.
— Robert Bringhurst, “Licking The Lips With A Forked Tongue”
To the enterprise of thinking, talk is every bit as dangerous as song. Poetry has to make its way between them.
— Robert Bringhurst, “Licking The Lips With A Forked Tongue”
Ästhetik ist ja nichts als eine angewandte Physiologie.
Aesthetics is really nothing but a kind of applied physiology.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, “Nietzsche contra Wagner”
Like headdresses, robes, and masks – the prized possessions known in Tlingit as ut.ûw – books have to be danced with, lived with, used, or else their power seeps away.
— Robert Bringhurst, “The Story and the Orphan: The narrative art of Elizabeth Nyman”
What a storyteller tells depends on who is listening, and how well.
— Robert Bringhurst, “The Story and the Orphan: The narrative art of Elizabeth Nyman”
As Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said, wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourselves.
— John Michael Greer, “The Laughter of Wolves”
Although most people do not realise it, there is a shocking possibility that living organisms draw upon forms of energy over and above those recognised by standard physics and chemistry.
— Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.
— Bill Mollison
Companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. Google is too big to care.
— Cory Doctorow, The Guardian
As an actual living art form, poetry is human speech at the edge of revelation, at the edge of discovery.
— David Whyte, Sounds True
If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Berry & Bloom
The moment we think we cannot talk to another human being is the moment we have decided they are no longer human.
— David Graeber, “The Handmaid’s Warning”
Perhaps the only thing we have in common in this world is fear. If so, we must find a way of speaking to the fear in one another, just as those who seek to divide us do. We must find the humanity trembling at the heart of hatred and hold it close and reveal to it our own trembling hearts.
— Rachel Donald, “The Handmaid’s Warning”
Rights are not a given because they are won. And when they are won, they also bestow responsibility on the liberated to fight for the rights of others.
— Rachel Donald, “The Handmaid’s Warning”
The hill we have to climb once our rights have been taken from us is much steeper than the hill we have to drag bigots up.
— Rachel Donald, “The Handmaid’s Warning”