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"If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." ~Jim Barksdale~
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” ~Walter Benjamin~
““You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be. I say that wherever I go.” … “But I don’t feel like it’s true, for me. I feel like it’s true for everyone else but not me. I feel like I have to do more than that. Like I have a responsibility to do more than that.” “Why?” Mosscap said. “Because I’m good at something,” Dex said. “I’m good at something that helps other people. I worked really hard to be able to do it, and I benefited from the labor and love of others while I did so. I’m able to do what I do because everybody else built a world in which I could do it. If I just say ‘Thanks for all of that, but I’m running off to the woods now,’ how is that fair? That doesn’t sit right with me, not at all. I’d just be a leech if I did that”
~Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy~
“The data-driven answer to life is as follows: Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex. It’s a lot easier than owning an auto dealership” ~Ben Kothe https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/opinion/sunday/rich-happiness-big-data.html~
“Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.” ~Kevin Kelly https://kk.org/thetechnium/103-bits-of-advice-i-wish-i-had-known/~
“risk analysts gain confidence not by being right but by the act of making decisions” ~SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/wise-2~
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” ~Howard Zinn~
“Remember -- and this is a conscious, considered, ongoing effort kind of remembering -- that it's a virus. This is the domain of necessity, like needing potable water and not eating arsenic. How you feel about it, your moral stance, your loneliness, none of them have any primary meaning. Duty requires that necessity be respected. (There being no just way to value your convenience about the lives of others.)” ~ Grayon http://dubiousprospects.blogspot.com/2021/12/vaccination-as-saving-throw.html~
“He had spent his lifetime working within an ancient, complex, and corrupt bureaucracy and court. He no longer believed one could legislate out of existence greed, or stupidity, or sheer perversity of will. It reassured him that neither could one legislate out of existence love, or hope, or the desire for beauty.” ~Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor~
“Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.” ~Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts~
“The human ripples of pain are still heartbreaking when made visible to us now. Our friend Agnolo the Fat wrote: ‘Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship…’” ~Dan Carlin, The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses~
"life is rooted in deaths republic" ~Alasdair Gray, from the ceiling of Oran Mor~
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” ~Kurt Vonnegut~
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” ~Richard Feynman~
“Books are imperishable only because burning them to ash takes so little (it’s not like blowing up buildings); they are imperishable only because they are so ready to survive, dispersed across the world, as trails of dust, kernels, memories, shreds. As to us, me and you, oh it’s simple. We are the broken vessels containing, spilling all over the place, those who came before us.” ~Axiomatic, Maria Tumarkin~
“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but it is enough.” ~Ted Chiang~
“What we need are freedom and rights. It is time we call out hypocrite honorings and fill the void with social justice. It is time we cast all medals into spearheads of revolution!” ~Pia Klemp~
“I rise like the sun above olive trees, like the moon above date palms. Where there is light, I shall be. Where there is darkness, there is none of me. I rise like the moon above date palms. I am counted as one among stars.” ~Book of the Dead, Ancient Egyptian Funerary Text, circa 1600 BCE~
“No society has the money to buy, at market prices, what it takes to raise children, make a neighbourhood safe, care for the elderly, make democracy work or address systemic injustices.... The only way the world is going to address social problems is by enlisting the very people who are classified as ‘clients’ and ‘consumers’ and converting them into co-workers, partners and rebuilders of the core economy.” ~Professor Edgar Cahn, US-based civil rights lawyer and inventor of Timebanks~
“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” ~Walter Benjamin~
“1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. 2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. 3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. 4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. 5. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. 6. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. 7. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. 8. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. 9. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. 10. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. 11.Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. 12. Security is one of your major goals in life.” ~Forer effect list~
“If you mount two clock pendulums side by side on the wall, they will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronize each other by picking up tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall.
Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment.
All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time. You can see it in the amoeba under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies on the atomic, the molecular, the sub-cellular, and the cellular levels. That constant, delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life itself made visible.
We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronizing the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment.
Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment — getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous.” ~Ursula K. Le Guin~
"Values that don't affect actions are just lies you tell yourself." ~anon~
“Humans can adapt to endure almost anything, but in doing so, they sometimes perpetuate incredible evil. The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” ~Hannah Arendt~
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." ~Kurt Vonnegut~
"The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. … The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. … The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. … The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. … The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate … The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. … The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. … The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." ~Marx~
"Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow." ~Carrie Fisher~
"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know." ~Wendell Berry~
"Time washes you away in a flood, and by the time you can turn your head and look back, the beach has dwindled to a thin tan line behind you. There is no further shore." ~Gardner Dozois~
“The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to re-assert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites. Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept. Odysseus brings not one man to shore with him. Yet he sleeps sound beside Calypso and when he wakes thinks only of Penelope.” ~Richard Adams (Watership Down)~
"Robots are labor made of capital" ~Alex Tabarrok~
"The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging in your closet belongs to the man who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put into the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help but fail to help." ~Basil, bishop of Caesarea, 450~
“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.” ~Osho~
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak." ~Ecclesiastes 3:1-7~
"And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise." ~Tolkien~
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love." ~Reinhold Niebuhr~
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" misquote of "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong." ~H.L. Mencken~
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."~Soren Kierkegaard~
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." ~J.K. Galbraith~
“Take care of yourselves, watch the people around you carefully, and cordon off the ones who are toxic, so that the universe can decontaminate them for you through exposure and death.” ~Warren Ellis~
"The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too." ~Rose Schneiderman~
"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~
"We are all changed by the tempest, each in our own way. Impulse must not govern action. Be merciful. Then you have done as he would have done. Go in peace.
Some say he died in that distant valley and lies in an unmarked grave. Some say he was translated up to the Chamber of Light by the hand of God our Mother, because of his great holiness. Some say he took a vow of silence and retired to an isolated monastery to pray and to teach by his example of humility and good works. But there remains a story— among the common folk from whom he sprang— that he walks abroad still. That he walks unseen to the sight of mortal women and men, except to those in hunger, those who suffer, those in need. That as he walks among the common people he touches a few, and at his touch the rose of compassion blooms in their hearts.” ~Kate Elliott, Crown of Stars~
“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.” ~Helen Keller~
"And eventually the pain did not return. But still he did not forget, and in some part of his soul he longed to make his homefaring back to his true kind, and he rarely passed a day when he did not think he could hear the inaudible sound of delicate claws, scurrying over the sands of silent seas." ~Robert Silverberg, Homefaring~
“Kindness eases change. Love quiets fear.” ~Octavia Butler~
"Love often doesn’t arrive at the right time or in the right person. It makes us do ridiculous and stupid things. But without it, life is just a series of unremarkable events, one after the other." ~Meghan Austin~
"...no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence." ~Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man~
“Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.” ~Terry Pratchett, Nation~
“They say time heals. No, it just wears away pain. It grinds everything to dust.” ~Neal Asher, Dark Intelligence~
"[in a market economy] the return to people’s efforts do not correspond to recognizable merit." ~Friedrich Hayek~
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings." ~Ursula K. Le Guin~
“There’s a phrase, “sitzfleisch”, which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, “If the muse is late for work, start without her”. You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you’re probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.” ~Peter S. Beagle~
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ~F.H. Bradley~
"Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case." ~Bertrand Russell~
“If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.” ~Richard Hamming~
"Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit." ~Ludwig Wittgenstein~
"The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall." ~Marcus Aurelius~
"The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one dischage from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre- To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire." ~T. S. Eliot Little Gidding~
"A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!" ~Richard Feynman~
"We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns." ~Tom Waits~
"But when I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies-poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it all righteousness or disinterested. But the war, is, I believe worth fighting... we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another." ~Winifred Holtby, South Riding (1936)~
“Wealth, therefore, is ‘The possession of the valuable by the valiant’; and in considering it as a power existing in a nation, the two elements, the value of the thing, and the valour of its possessor, must be estimated together. Whence it appears that many of the persons commonly considered wealthy, are in reality no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes are, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth; and operating for the nation, in an economical point of view, either as pools of dead water, and eddies in a stream (which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people, but may become of importance in a state of stagnation should the stream dry); or else, as dams in a river, of which the ultimate service depends not on the dam, but the miller; or else, as mere accidental stays and impediments, acting not as wealth, but (for we ought to have a correspondent term) as ‘illth,’ causing various devastation and trouble around them in all directions; or lastly, act not at all, but are merely animated conditions of delay, (no use being possible of anything they have until they are dead,) in which last condition they are nevertheless often useful as delays, and ‘impedimenta,’ …" ~John Ruskin (Unto This Last)~
"The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects — in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. We vilify and curse them for their damnable intransigence. They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something." ~Stephen Jay Gould (Wonderful Life 1989)~
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ~Rainer Maria Rilke~
"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." ~Ephesians 2:10~
"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think." ~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed~
"We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere." ~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed~
"Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out." ~Titus Livy~
"Charity as ordinarily practised, the charity of endowment, the charity of emotion, the charity which takes the place of justice, creates much of the misery which it relieves, but does not relieve all the misery it creates." ~Joseph Rowntree~
"There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm." ~Walter Benjamin~
"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joy of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?" ~Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus~
"Money is a sign of poverty. A cheque book is really a ration book." ~Iain Banks~
“I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.” ~Lois McMaster Bujold~ Shards of Honour.
“The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.” ~Iain Banks~ Complicity
"If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home." ~Ursula K. Le Guin~ The Dispossessed
"Sorrow be damned & all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure & certain people prepared to maim & kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder & a child crying" ~Iain Banks~ Against a Dark Background
"Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love." ~Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Kindly Ones~
“We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash.” ~Iain Banks~, The Crow Road.
“Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the greatest good for the greatest number can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.” ~Aneurin Bevan~
"It is not on you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.“ ~Rabbi Tarfon~
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.” ~Rose Schniederman~
"William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!" ~A Man for All Seasons~
"I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris." ~Roger Ebert~
"Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won." ~Iain M. Banks~
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” ~Nietzche~
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ~Rainer Maria Rilke~
"People generally, myself included, think that their own level of complaining is appropriate and that other people's complaining is disproportionate." ~jessamyn~
"The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance." ~Jane Austen~
“A man said to the universe: ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘However,’ replied the universe, ‘The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.’” ~Stephen Crane~
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." ~Richard Dawkins~
"What we would like to do is to change the world – make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute – the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words – we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend." ~Dorothy Day~
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ~Kurt Vonnegut~
"the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice" ~Martin Luther King~
"we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not" ~Iain M. Banks~
"Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths. Poetry is a journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment." ~Carl Sandburg~
'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." "REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE" 'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little- " "YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES" 'So we can believe the big ones?" "YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING" 'They're not the same at all!" "YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- " Death waved a hand. "AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED" 'Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point---" "MY POINT EXACTLY" ~Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)~
"Real winnders don't compete" ~Finnish saying via Pasi Sahlberg~
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come" ~Matt Groening~
"If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: “It’s gonna go wrong.” Or “She’s going to hurt me.” Or, “I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore …” Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.." ~Ray Bradbury~
"Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." ~Georges Clemenceau~
"What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it." ~Eugene Gendlin~
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." ~Richard Dawkins~
"Everyone's future is, in reality, uncertain and full of unknown treasures from which all may draw unguessed prizes." ~Lord Dunsany~
“Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life” ~Gabrielle Hamilton~
"Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum puto. Vel me monere hoc vel percontari puta: Rectum'st, ego ut faciam ; non est, te ut deterream." ~Publius Terentius Afer~
"I am human: nothing human is alien to me. ... If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight." ~Publius Terentius Afer, trans K. Anthony Appiah
"We touch other peoples lives simply by existing." ~J.K. Rowling~
"Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 6.4311~
"The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth." ~Henry Beston, The Outermost House~
"Responsible action must decide not simply between right and wrong, good and evil, but between right and right, wrong and wrong." ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer~
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry~
"Every cell in your bloodstream is less than 28 days old (with the exception of a small number of memory B and T lymphocytes -- part of the adaptive immune system). Even among those persistent memory cells, the individual biomolecules of which they are comprised will be turned over within a period of hours to months.Pretty much all the cells in your body -- except for the central nervous system and some components of the immune system -- are less than a decade old. Even among those that are long-lived, it's a case of George Washington's Axe: two handles and three axe-heads later a case can be made that they're not the same. You are nothing more and nothing less than a copy of yourself." ~ Charlie Stross ~
"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day to day living that wears you out."~Anton Chekhov~
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." ~Marcus Aurelius~
"Love is being stupid together." ~Paul Valery~
"From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable." ~Jimmy Reid~
"Health is a characteristic which emerges from living in a fair and civilized society" ~Harry Burns~ (Chief Medical Officer for Scotland)
"Now the names of these new Distempers are the Strong Fives, the Moon-pall, the Marthambles, and the Hockogrocle. Although the Names, Natures, Symptoms and several cures of these New Diseases are altogther Unknown to our greatest Physicians, and the particular knowledge of them would (if conceal'd) be a vast advantage to the aforesaid person; yet he, well knowing that his country's good is to be prefer'd to his private interest, doth hereby promise all sorts of People, a faithful cure of any or all of the Diseases aforesaid, at as Reasonable Rates as our modern Doctors have for that of any common Distemper. " ~Dr. Tufts~
"To serve educational needs, without regard to the vulgar irrelevancies of class and income is part of a teacher’s honour." ~R.H. Tawney~
"Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that he or she can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need. When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there, find the words: 'For my sake was the world created.' But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words: 'I am but dust and ashes.'" ~Simcha Bunim~
"What does the Lord require of you? Only this: to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God." ~Micah 6.8~
"There are people who give up their own needs and comforts for the causes of others, and in the process, they are healed themselves" ~Bhai, Gurdas, Vaar 4, Pauri 15~
"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." ~Leon Festinger~
"The idea that all you need to run a business is a standard set of administrative tools, because awareness of what the business does is irrelevant technical stuff -- and the associated axiom that the only yardstick for success in life is to maximize your collection of universally-substitutable-barter-tokens -- is what I'm wanting to stamp down on" ~Charlie Stross~
"I see no God up here" ~Yuri Gagarin~
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" ~Kurt Vonnegut~
“It is unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.” ~John Ruskin~
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ~Peter F. Drucker~
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower~
"male and female humans are far more alike than different on almost every measurable trait other than uterine volume and penis length" ~Mattir OM~
"A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say" ~Michael Winner~
"Friction is the “effect of reality on ideas and intentions”" ~Carl von Clausewitz~
"Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'" ~Terry Pratchett~ (Nation)
"Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void" ~Eliezer S. Yudkowsky~
“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” ~Samuel Beckett~
"When I was young I fully expected to do great things. Instead, my legacy is a few copies of my genes (I did do a good job picking out the other set of chromosomes to go with them), some good conversation, a lot of clean clothes and dishes that got dirty again, and a few old dogs who had longer and happier lives than they otherwise would have. There are almost 7 billion of us out here. We can't all be stars" ~Lila~
"I propose a quick and dirty test for large organizations: look at photos of leaders and top management. If they all look vaguely similar, you're not looking at an open-source meritocracy." ~Teresa Nielsen Hayden~
"Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat." ~1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party~
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." ~Frederick Douglass~
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." ~Phillip K. Dick~
"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." ~Winston Churchill~
"Don't judge your insides by other people's outsides" ~trad~
"The map is not the territory, but you can't fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment" ~Elizer Yudkowsky~
"Some mathematicians believe that numbers were invented by human beings, others, equally competent, believe that numbers have a sufficiently independent existence of their own and are merely observed by sufficiently intelligent mortals" ~E T Bell~
"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create." ~Leonard I. Sweet~
"This 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, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." ~Adam Smith~
"It distresses us to return work that is less than perfect" (seen on a dry-cleaners note and then adopted as an epitaph) ~Peter O'Toole~
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." ~Frank Herbert~
"No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That's all I have to say on that subject." ~Philip Pullman~
"Q. What does it really mean when you've reached the average life expectancy for your birth year and gender? A. It means half your friends are dead." ~Paul Lutus~
"Miller's Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of." ~George Miller~
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind." ~Kurt Vonnegut~
"I do not have an hyperactive imagination, I just happen to live in an underactive universe." ~Anthony Liekens~
"what is real but compassion as we move from birth to death " ~Greg Brown~
“The three-chord democracy of rock’n’roll has left in its trail the corpses of many a crappy record.” ~Neven Mrgan~
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” ~Albert Camus~
“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art - write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” ~Neil Gaiman~
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." ~Bill Cosby~
“I dreamed I saw a tree full of angels, up on Primrose Hill And I flew with them over the Great Wen till I had seen my fill Of such poverty and misery sure to tear my soul apart I've got a socialism of the heart, I've got a socialism of the heart” ~Billy Bragg~
"liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts." ~Saul Alinsky~
"And as I lean back against against the edge of a dream I’m not allowed to hold, this music allows me to believe, to think that somewhere in the dark night there’s a home with my name on the door, a number that means I’m safe." ~Gabrielle Bouliane~
"We exist by successive approximations of fail better" ~Elizabeth Bear~
“Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupations and their powers, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there would be no overall inequality of the sort we have got used to” ~Lord Young of Dartington~
"If I had had any idea when I was a child the degree to which the adults running everything have absolutely no idea what they're doing, I would have been so frightened I would never have gotten out of bed." ~Jonathan Schwarz~
"Home is something you make, not something you find. Something you're always leaving, and somewhere you're always looking for or returning to. It's part of growing up, and not the best part." ~Neil Gamian~
"Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience." ~Albert Einstein~