QUOTES

Here's a bunch of stuff that other people have said much more eloquently than I could have. About half of these are taken directly from books i've read-- you should read them too!!! But the other half are all just quotes that I've heard other people use, so they might have been taken out-of-context or attributed to the wrong person(if you find any mistakes please lemme know). Hope you find something of interest here.

I always want to murder writers who say that the writing is such fun. I think that the writing is like training for the Olympics.
--CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

When the Way is forgotten
Duty and justice appear;
Then knowledge and wisdom are born
Along with hypocrisy.


When harmonious relationships dissolve
Then respect and devotion arise;
When a nation falls to chaos
Then loyalty and patriotism are born.
--LAO TZE

"Man seeks to range out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world; and hunts out misery in imaginary regions.... He would be a metaphysician before he has become a practical philosopher. He quits the contemplation of realities to meditate on chimeras. He neglects experience to feed on conjecture, to indulge in hypothesis."
--HENRI d'HOLBACH, The System of Nature

The truth is replaced by silence, and the silence is a lie.
--YEVGENY YEVTESHENKO

History, such as it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later on, the richer classes' rule have been promoted, established, and maintained.... while, on the other side, the mutual-aid factor has been totally lost sight of; it was simply denied, or even scoffed at, by the writers of the present and past generation.
--PETER KROPOTKIN, Mutual Aid

That movement toward depriving others of their subjectivity, I thought, is THE central movement of our culture. Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.
--DERRICK JENSEN

Why should we cherish "objectivity," as if ideas were innocent, as if they don't serve one interest or another? Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view. But we don't want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don't play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don't take sides in those struggles.
--HOWARD ZINN, Declarations of Independence

Igor Stravinsky had this to say about inspiration. "An accident is perhaps the only thing that really inspires us." he writes in his Poetics of Music, written at Harvard in 1942. "A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out...he is in his quest for pleasure" Whoa. Did you get that? Accidents. Pleasure. We exert effort looking for that shred of musical illumination, digging and sifting through debris until something tweaks us internally and we realize we have stumbled on something oh-so-infinitely cool. What? The world-renowned creator of The Rite of Spring says its all a happy accident!? Is it that simple? What does this mean? It means let the hands and mind play about with the tools....It is the pleasure in putting a piece together that brings it from spark to final form.
--RICH

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all--ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.... describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty--describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses--would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention there. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past.... And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses... Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.
--RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

Industrialism(whether socialist or capitalist) requires cheap and obedient labor, a constant input of raw materials, and ever expanding markets of indiscriminate consumers. Being parasitic, the system requires continued subsidy by nature and the capture of ever more customers.'Globalization,' then, is the spread of this parasitic, monetized, commodity-driven, inequitable, monocultural socioeconomic system from the center of empire to its periphery.
--DERRICK JENSEN & GEORGE DRAFFAN. Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
--MURIEL RUKEYSER

From the discovery-invention of the corpse, through its resurrection as machine and reanimation via reflex, to its appearance as industrial worker, robot, and astronaut, the abandonment of the body has been in the service of re-creating a body as distant from life as from death, a body purified of passion and history, an efficient body of technical functioning. The matter of the body has been washed clean of all the impurities of life, of all those qualities which would make the body difficult to quantify, control, and dominate, and part of that process of purification has been the inscription of all those undesired elements onto the flesh of the feminine body. Not unsurprisingly, then, this body became identified as marked by excess, by an excess of emotional life, making it wild, brutish, unpredictable and uncontrollable; and especially by an excess of passion, making it threateningly erotic, and even sinful, and hence requiring its burning or imprisonment or even death, requiring at any cost its obedience and its silence. Consigned to a shadowy existence, to a realm on the margins of the official consciousness of culture, this body of passion, of life, of death, of history, of desire, could appear only in broken, twisted form, only in guises easily assigned a negative index, only as witch or madwoman, only dazed in the safe and controllable sleep of hypnosis, only as monster, only as neurotic to be diagnosed and cured.
--ROBERT D. ROMANYSHYN. Technology as Symptom and Dream

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
--BERTRAND RUSSELL

I'm terribly disturbed by seeing how in a city like new york, a child, no matter what his social background, is exposed from the first moment he steps outside to noise, dirt, disorder, and UGLINESS. I'm sure that this is conditioning people in an awful way. I don't think this kind of thing kills people, that's where I differ profoundly from the more alarmist ecologists... I always tell them that, in my opinion, the danger is not that we will all be killed by pollution and over-population. What is going to happen is that we are going to accept the situation, and make some kind of adjustment to it. We may in the long run suffer physically as well, but the immediate danger is that we are losing our sense of what the environment could and should be.
....
There is a young lady working with me here who is immensely sensitive and perceptive, but because she has hardly ever been out of new york she has never seen the milky way. Never seen the milky way! You can not see it in new york anymore, ever. To me this is a symbol of what really matters. She is not going to be killed by pollution, but she has never seen the milky way. And she has never really experienced the fragrance of spring. This is such an impoverishment. I think it is by far the most important influence of the environment on the future of our society. We risk the loss of our sensual perceptions. And if you lose those, naturally you try to compensate by other stimulations, by very loud noise, or very bright lights, or drugs.
--RENE DUBOS, an interview in Philosophers of the Earth, by Anne Chisholm

How little note is taken of the deeds of Nature! What paper publishes her reports? If one pine were placed in a town square, what admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the many pine trees in the free woods, though open to everybody?
--JOHN MUIR, unpublished journal edited by Linnie Wolfe

All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast--all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love.
--JOHN MUIR

Deeply involved with our whole estrangement from nature is the embarrassment of 'having' a body. It is perhaps an egg-and-hen question as to whether we resent the body because we think we are spirits, or vice versa, but we are accustomed to feeling that our bodies are vehicles in which we are compelled to live, vehicles which are at once all too much ourselves and yet utterly foreign. Responding only most imperfectly to the will and resisting the comprehension of the intellect, the body seems to be thrust upon us... we love it most dearly, and yet must spend most of our time working to support it. Its five senses, delicate and vibrant, communicate the whole delight and glory of the world at the price of being equally receptive to its agony and horror. For the body is sensitive because it is soft, pliant, and impressionable, but it lives in a universe which is for the most part rock and fire. When young we let our consciousness expand with joy through all the innumerable passages of its nerves, but as time goes on we begin to withdraw, and beg the surgeon to 'fix' it like a wayward machine, to cut away the pieces which rot and ache, and to dope the jangling senses which so inconsiderately retain their alertness while all else deteriorates.
....
Seen neither as something to be condemned nor in its accustomed aspect of serious worth, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter. His insistent purposefulness and his extraordinary preoccupation with abstractions are, while perfectly natural, overdone--like the vast bodies of dinosaurs. As means of survival and adaptation they have been overplayed, producing a species too cunning and too practical for its own good...
--ALAN WATTS. Nature, Man, and Woman

In a society that accords priority to that which is predictable and places a premium on certainty, our spontaneous preconceptual experience, when acknowledged at all, is referred to as 'merely subjective'. The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding in the 'realer' world of quantifiable and measurable scientific 'facts'. It is a curious inversion of the actual demonstrable state of affairs. Subatomic quanta are now taken to be more primordial and 'real' than the world we experience with our unaided senses. The living, feeling, and thinking organism is assumed to derive, somehow, from the mechanical body whose reflexes and 'systems' have been measured and mapped, the living person now an epiphenomenon of the anatomized corpse. That it takes living sensing subjects, complete with their enigmatic emotions and unpredictable passions, to conceive of these subatomic fields, or to dissect and anatomize the body, is readily overlooked, or brushed aside as inconsequential.
--DAVID ABRAM, The Spell of the Sensuous

The True mathematician is a poet.
--KARL WEIERSTRASS

I don't take your words
Merely as words
Far from it.
I listen
To what makes you talk-
Whatever that is-
And me listen.
--SHINKICHI TAKAHASHI.'Words'. from Afterimages, translated by Lucie Stryk and Takashi Ikemote(1972)

I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion my own training in two elite universities taught me, that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell-curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable, scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended. The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence--insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality-- that I became confused. They didn't do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.
--JOHN TAYLOR GATTO, Dumbing Us Down, the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Children are aliens, and we treat them as such.
--EMERSON

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
--T.H. HUXLEY

When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater.
--SHAW

Painting is a way to examine the world in ways denied me by the U.S. Justice System, a way to travel beyond the walls and bars of the penitentiary. Through my paints I can be with my people, in touch with my culture, tradition, and spirit. I can watch little children in regalia, dancing and smiling, see my elders in prayer, behold the intense glow of a warrior's eye. As I work the canvas I am a free man. I hope that each day, each time you look at these paintings, you are inspired to partake in the struggle for human rights of indigenous people, of All people who suffer oppression economically, socially, and spiritually. Justice is not a flexible tool, and unless we all do our part to ensure that justice is applied equally to all human beings, we are party to its abuse. We must stand together to protect the rights of others. No child should go hungry, no woman denied the right to earn a living, no person refused health care or an education, no prisoner held for political reasons. I thank you for caring. Were it not for the compassionate people, all hope for the future would be lost. In the spirit of Crazy Horse, LEONARD PELTIER
--a letter from Leavenworth federal penitentiary

While we have prisons, it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
--SHAW

They are a conquered nation, and when you are conquered, the people you are conquered by dictate your future. This is a basic philosophy of mine. If I'm part of a conquered nation, I've got to yield to authority... a colonial police force.
--norman zigrossi, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, FBI, Rapid City 1973

Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.
--MARK TWAIN

Law is born from despair of human nature.
--ORTEGA Y GASSET

A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than by the occasional occurrence of crime.
--WILDE

Man... I could tell you a thousand tiresome stories of their absurdity. They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts. Insanity--the simplest insanity ever devised! Simple facts in isolation and facts to connect them--ands and buts-- are the sine qua non of all their glorious achievement. But there are no such facts. Connectedness is the essence of everything. It doesn't stop them, of course.
....
In ratty furs the peasants hoe their fields, fat with stupidity if not flesh. Their foodsmells foul the doorways, dungeon dark, where cow-eyed girls give tit to the next generation's mindless hoe. Old men with ringworm in their beards limp dusty lanes to gather like bony dogs at the god-lined square where the king's justice is dispensed; to nod like crows at slips of tongue by which a horse is lost, or delicate mistakes of venue through which murderers run free. "Long live the king!" they squeak,"to whom we owe all joy!" Obese with imagined freedom if not with fat, great lords of lords look down with cowdog eyes and smile. "All's well," they sigh. "Long live the king! All's well!" Law rules the land. Men's violence is chained to good(i.e. to the king): legitimate force that chops the bread-thief's neck and wipes its ax--death by book. Think, sweating beast! Look up and think! Whence came these furs on the backs of your kind protectors? Why does the bread-thief die and the murdering thane escape by a sleight by the costliest of advocates? Think! Squeeze up your wrinkled face and seize the hangnail tip of a searing thought: Violence hacked this shack-filled hole in the woods where you play freedom games. Violence no more legitimate then than a wolf's. And now by violence they lock us in--you and me, old man; subdue our vile unkingly violence.
--JOHN GARDNER's Grendel

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.
--ERIC HOFFER. The True Believer.

I have this thing with people. I really love people. Nothing can compare with talking with people and getting to know people, but I get hung up in social situations. The way my image is projected towards them is poor. You look at a guy and you say,'Gee, am I better than him?' You know, it's the way people look at eachother. I'm not entirely hung up on the way people see me. It's just the way people act towards one another. There's a lack of communication, a lack of feeling. It sucks, it's really shitty. People are too far apart-- but it happens all the time by accident. Like my friend who had the bad trip. I really felt like a shit because I fell asleep on him. I was stoned, I was really tired and I was trying to keep awake, to keep him company, but I couldn't do it. But things like that happen on purpose. People are cruel to eachother. Well, I mean, some of it can't be helped, really. My mother is a conservative and my grandmother is reactionary. Like if my mother found out I smoke grass, she'd die. It would really be bad, she couldn't understand, she's too far removed. Yet I know that when she was young, she wanted to get away from my grandmother something fierce. My grandmother is a bigot. She uses words like 'nigger'. I wish she'd give that up. She thinks they don't belong. When you get down to the important things there are differences of opinion that just can't be worked out. Like the war(Vietnam). I'm not sure that I want to go into the service, or even register for the draft--I mean, that's involuntary servitude. So that's the way I see it. I approached my mother about it. I told her that I really didn't want to go and she said,'It's all right if you don't go, but I'll really be sick if you don't. I'll be physically sick."
Finally she said that if I didn't go, she wouldn't think of me as her son. That's a real threat, isn't it? Middle-class life is too complicated. I was just shopping today, and there was a lady next to me with her newspaper and she's there with all the food right in front of her, ripping out these different things, you know, leafing through the paper and whenever she saw something that was in the paper that she had on the counter she'd rip it out and save maybe 3 cents on something. You know, something like that. What a terrible drag. But isn't that what everybody's doing? You go down the highway on Saturday night and all the stores are open and people are buying, buying, buying. You stand outside the garden-supply store and watch these ugly housewives carrying off all these plastic knick-knacks. All these things. We have 2 cars, 2 houses--counting the summer place-- and 3 television sets, I'm not even going to count all the radios. People don't even notice eachother. It's really sad that people don't notice eachother. You have a whole room full of kids, and there's one girl talking to another, and you're not allowed to talk to them, because you don't know them. But you should, because they're people and you should say hello and smile...
--FRANK, from an interview in The Music of Their Laughter by Roderick Thorp and Robert Blake

Prosperity under despots is still slavery.
--DEMOCRITUS

Those who are solemn and pontifical are not to be successfully fought by being even more solemn and pontifical.
-BERTRAND RUSSELL, preface to Unpopular Essays

A pessimist cannot be a revolutionary.... But we're also realists--if you're not a realist you may lose the battle, you need to be aware of the problems. In other words, you have to be optimistic but, at the same time, realistic and you must believe in human beings, despite the fact that the human being hasn't yet given much proof of being sufficiently wise. They need more wisdom, but they can get it... Now we are rapidly advancing. Let's see what you can do with the mass media and how you can help to develop culture and not to destroy it, to teach history and not to ignore it.
--FIDEL CASTRO, in an interview with CNN

The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration. There is a chance that such a movement could succeed in doing what the system itself has never done-- bring about great change with little violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite's weapons, money, control of information would be useless in the face of a determined population. The servants of the system would refuse to work to continue the old, deadly order, and would begin using their time, their space--the very things given them by the system to keep them quiet-- to dismantle that system while creating a new one.
The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, or our great-grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.
--HOWARD ZINN, A People's History of the United States

Keeping people happy and motivated is difficult, but it is also the most important task for anyone organizing a group of people who are attempting to achieve a difficult cooperative goal.
--JONATHAN CHEY, Game Developer May '02

In addition to the motive which the gadget-worshipper finds for his admiration of the machine in its freedom from the human limitations of speed and accuracy, there is one motive which it is harder to establish in any concrete case, but which must play a very considerable role nonetheless. It is the desire to avoid the personal responsibility for a dangerous or disastrous decision by placing the responsibility elsewhere: on chance, on human superiors and their policies which one cannot question, or on a mechanical device which one cannot fully understand but which has a presumed objectivity....
Homeostasis, whether for the individual or the race, is something of which the very basis must sooner or later be reconsidered....Here let me remark that both the Eastern and Western homeostasis of the present day is being made with the intention of fixing permanently the concepts of a period now long past... Permanent homeostasis of society can not be made on a rigid assumption of a complete permanence of Marxianism, nor can it be made on a similar assumption concerning a standardized concept of free enterprise and the profit motive. It is not the form of rigidity that is particularly deadly so much as rigidity itself, whatever the form.
--NORBERT WIENER, God and Golem(1964)

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
--NIETZSCHE

It is the great public which is demanding the utmost of secrecy for modern science in all things which may touch its military uses. This demand for secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civilization not to learn the progress of its own disease.... In this new attitude of the masses at large to research, there is a revolution in science far beyond what the public realizes.... In the past the direction of research had largely been left to the interest of the individual scholar and to the trend of the times. At present, there is a distinct attempt so to direct research in matters of public security that as far as possible, all significant avenues will be developed with the objective of securing an impenetrable stockade of scientific protection. Now, science is impersonal, and the result of a further pushing forward of the frontiers of science is not merely to show us many weapons which we may employ against possible enemies, but also many dangers of these weapons(to us).... The hurrying up of the pace of science owing to our active simultaneous search for all means of attacking our enemies and of protecting ourselves, leads to ever-increasing demands for new research. In our present militaristic frame of mind, this has forced on us the problem of possible countermeasures to a new employment of these agencies on the part of an enemy. This enemy may be Russia at the present moment, but it is even more the reflection of ourselves in a mirage. To defend ourselves against this phantom, we must look to new scientific measures, each more terrible than the last. There is no end to this apocalyptic spiral.
--NORBERT WIENER, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

His greatness was that he confronted the image of life as a whole in order to interpret it as a whole, while the subtlest minds can not be freed from the error that one can come closer to such an interpretation if one examines painstakingly the colors with which this image has been painted and the material underneath... The whole future of all the sciences is staked on an attempt to understand this canvas and these colors, but not the image.
--FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 'untimely meditation' on Schopenhauer as educator

One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
--the fox in The Little Prince by ANTOINE DE ST EXUPERY, translation by Richard Howard

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life
--EINSTEIN, The World As I See It

The world outside of me is created by me--not the trees, not the clouds, the bees and the beauty of the landscape-- but human existence in relationship, which is called society, that is created by you and me. So the world is me and I am the world; the world being society in which I live, with its culture, morality, inequality, all the chaos that is going on in society, that is myself in action. Moreover, the culture is what I have created and what I am caught in. I think that is an irrevocable and absolute fact.
--J. KRISHNAMURTI, The Awakening of Intelligence

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it's wrong.
--BUCKMINSTER FULLER

The history of art is the history of revivals.
--SAMUEL BUTLER, note-books

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
--PABLO PICASSO, from Dore Ashton's Picasso on Art

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism' I reach for my buck knife.
--EDWARD ABBEY

As to hanging, she thought it no great hardship, for, were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn Pyrate and so infest the seas, that men of courage must starve.
--about MARY READ, The American Way of Crime by F. Browning and J. Gerassi

...and there are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are.
--SAMUEL BUTLER, Erewhon

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
--CARL JUNG

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.
--ST. EXUPERY

Here's what I tell myself, and others who are beating themselves up when things don't seem to be going right: there are plenty of people out there who are more than willing to criticize and condemn me and what I do; I've got to think kindly of myself and my actions, or else I'm just one of the crowd.
--JACK BIELLO, former author of freekevin.com

Let me sleep, my soul is drunk with love.
--KAHLIL GIBRAN, from Visions of the Prophet, a Collection of Arabic Poems

Good and Evil, Evil and Good: the actors change masks, the heroes become monsters and the monsters heroes, in accord with the demands of the theater's playwrights.
--EDUARDO GALEANO

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain 'til you see their specks dispersing? It's the all-too-huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
--JACK KEROUAC

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin splitting throats.
--H.L. MENCKEN

There is nothing like a dream to make the future.
--VICTOR HUGO

No man, then, should feel insignificant, for it only takes one man to alter the consciousness of mankind through the spirit-that-moves-in-all-things.
--Grandfather, from TOM BROWN JR.'s The Quest

In every party there is one member who, by his all-too-devout pronouncement of the party principles, provokes the others to apostasy.
--NIETZSCHE

My life was in front of me, shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a beautiful life. But I couldn't pass judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I have spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing.
--from JEAN-PAUL SARTRE's 'The Wall'

He felt very strong, and the feeling was more than the physical change he had experienced the past few months. The memories awaiting his black-box telephone calls were constantly present in his awareness now, like friends asleep in homes far across the country. Friends might not be thinking of him, but he could instantly reestablish relationships merely by pushing 10 or 11 buttons on the telephone panel. As a man was the sum of his relationships in the world and the result of the experience with those relationships Eddie was now, in part, the sum of the memories and command potentials linked to his fingers. He experienced himself as part of an enormous nervous system... it moved from his brain and through his fingers into the keyboard, from the cool transistorized circuits of the console out into the black wires glistening on high towers across the country, hurled at incredible speeds by radio relays across the fields and mountains and rivers, buried deep under the sea for journeys across the world.... As his fingers touched the keys of the silent console, he felt as if they could emit sparks, as if they alone could bring the circuits alive and make them both extensions of and part of himself.
--BRUCE JACKSON, The Programmer

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
--MARCEL DUCHAMP, The Creative Act

Writers are shakers and the police will always fear writers because of their capacity to destabilize. I think it's always been true. Writers are more dangerous than others; they're the undercover agents of the other side, in a way.
--RAMSEY CLARKE, when asked about the FBI's increasing attention to writers

All totalitarians have had the need to control the minds of the populace--censorship, propaganda-- but mainly censorship and book burnings, or throwing authors in jail. The same guys who want to censor, press the button and start the war, I think.
--ALLEN GINSBERG, from interviews by Natalie Robins in Alien Ink

Well, they outlawed LSD. It'll be interesting to see what they do with this.
--JERRY GARCIA, after his first experience with VR

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
--CHUANG-TZU

If all the dreams which men had dreamed during a particular period were written down, they would give an accurate notion of the spirit which prevailed at the time.
--HEGEL

Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parents. It may assent to them, but it brings them out into the open.
--WHITEHEAD, in Science and the Modern World

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--THOREAU

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only NOT indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
--THOREAU

The dangers threatening modern science can not be averted by more experimenting, for our complicated experiments no longer have anything to do with nature in her own right, but with nature charged and transformed by our own cognitive activity.
--HEISENBERG

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more permanently enduring.
--CONRAD

Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
--BILL GATES, describing Microsoft's business strategy for the Asian market

If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.
--WHITEHEAD, in Science and the Modern World

For so many years I've kind of-- of had a lot of reasons for not giving time to people or not saying things to them. Silly things mostly, really simple stuff like, 'I'd like to know you better,' or,'I care about what happens to you.' I don't know what I was afraid they'd say back to me.
--Joanna from the Silicon Mage, by BARBARA HAMBLY

What appears as external reality is actually only a mirror of your own inner consciousness.
--HUA CHING NI

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
--Hamlet, Act I(apparently this was Freud's favorite quotation)

It is... the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its 'subjective sense', poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of 'peoples', but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves... each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons.
--JOSEPH CAMPBELL, Myths to Live By p.266

Father: You know, the conventional view is that religion evolved out of magic, but I think it was the other way around-- that magic is a sort of degenerate religion... for example, I do not believe that the original purpose of the rain dance was to make 'it' rain. I suspect that that is a degenerate misunderstanding of a much more profound religious need: to affirm membership in what we may call the ecological tautology, the eternal verities of life and environment. There's always a tendency--almost a need-- to vulgarize religion, to turn it into entertainment or politics or magic or 'power'
Daughter: And ESP, OBE, Spiritualism?
Father: All symptoms, mistaken attempts at cute efforts to escape from a crude materialism that becomes intolerable. A miracle is a materialist's idea of how to escape from his materialism.
Daughter: Is there no escape?
Father: Oh, yes. But, you see, magic is really only a sort of pseudoscience. And like applied science, it always proposes the possibility of control. So you don't get away from all that way of thought by sequences into which that way of thinking is already built-in.
Daughter: So how do you get away?
Father: Ah, yes. THE REPLY TO CRUDE MATERIALISM IS NOT MIRACLES BUT BEAUTY.
It is consciousness running around like a dog with its tongue out--literally cynicism-- that asks the too simple question and shapes up the vulgar answer. To be conscious of the nature of the sacred or the nature of beauty is the folly of reductionism.
--GREGORY BATESON'S Mind and Nature

The value of a theory is NOT that is fits what physicists already know but that it points to what they do not know.
--BRUCE GREGORY. Inventing Reality, Physics and Language

The greatest purpose of art is to discover.
--MARCO of ALEXANDRIA

The subliminal lesson that is taught whenever the computer is used(unless a careful effort is made to offset that effect) is the data-processing model of the mind. This model connects with a major transition in our economic life, one that brings us to a new stage of high-tech industrialism, the so-called Information Age with its service-oriented economy. Behind that transition, powerful corporate interests are at work shaping a new social order. The government(especially the military) as a prime customer and user of information technology, is allied to the corporations in building that order. Intertwined with both, a significant well-financed segment of the technical and scientific community--the specialists in A.I. and Cognitive Science-- has lent the computer model of the mind the sanction of a deep metaphysical proposition. All these forces, aided by the persuasive skills of the advertisers, have fixed upon the computer as an educational instrument; the machine brings that formidable constellation of social interests to the classroom and the campus. The more room and status it is given there by educators, the greater the influence these interests will have.
Yet these are the interests that are making the most questionable use of the computer. At their hands, this promising technology--itself a manifestation of prodigious human imagination and inventiveness-- is being degraded into a means of surveillance and control, of financial and managerial centralization, of manipulating public opinion, of making war. The presence of personal computers in millions of homes, especially when they are used as little more than trivial amusements, does not in any meaningful way offset the power the machine brings to those who use it for these purposes....
Under these circumstances, the best approach to computer literacy might be to stress the limitations and abuses of the machine, showing the students how little they need it to develop their autonomous powers of thought.
There may even be a sound ecological justification for such a curriculum. It can remind children of their connection with the lively world of nature that lies beyond the industrial environment of machines and cities.... it may mean far more at this juncture in history for children once again to find their kinship with the animals, every one of which, in its own inarticulate way, displays greater powers of mind than any computer can even mimic well.
--THEODORE ROSZAK, in Cult of Information

Maybe boredom is a backwash within another mental state, the one called MANIA--defined by psychologists as an abnormal state of excitement, encompassing exhilaration, elation, euphoria, a sense of the mind racing. Maybe our hurry sickness is as simple as that. We--those of us in the faster cities and faster societies and faster mass culture of the technocratic dawn of the third millennium C.E.-- are manic.... These are the time obsessions of complex civilizations, populous nation-states with many technologies. In other forms of human society time passes differently.... neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had. It is what you live in. You can drift in its currents, or you can swim.
--JAMES GLEICK. FSTR.

The causes of obesity and lack of exercise can be traced to unexpected increases in stress, depression, and anxiety. People are working more, sleeping less, and gobbling anti-depressants at an astonishing rate. The increased pace of life and the information age are overwhelming us, and the effects are evident.
--ROBERT E. THAYER. Calm Energy: how people regulate mood with food and exercise

As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
--ANON

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfolded beneath a clear blue sky?
--ROGER WATERS

Women were made to be loved, not to be understood.
--OSCAR WILDE

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
--EMERSON

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
--SUSAN B. ANTHONY

But how will artists be rewarded for their work without copyright?
"Firstly, even if copyright were the only way that artists could be rewarded for their work, then I would contend that freedom is more important than having professional artists(those who claim that we would have no art do not understand creativity: people will always create, it is a compulsion. the only question is whether they can do it for a living) Secondly, it could be questioned whether copyright is effective even now. The music industry is one of the most vocally opposed to enhancements in communication technology, yet according to many of the artists who should be rewarded by copyright, it is failing to do so. Rather it has allowed middle-men to gain control over the mechanisms of distribution, to the detriment of both artists and the public.
--IAN CLARKE(FreeNet author)

You shouldn't write anything you don't believe.
--LAJOS EGRI, The Art of Dramatic Writing

It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
--Wonko the Sane, in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, by DOUGLAS ADAMS

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
--St. EXUPERY

Race does not exist. Racism exists.
--CHARLES KEYES, anthropologist at the univ. of wash.

The urge to destroy is a creative urge.
--BAKUNIN

The world contains much more narrow-mindedness than real vice; but there is still sympathy and trust, friendliness and goodwill enough so that one can not break the stick over the world of humans. I do not believe in perfection of either present or future humankind; the world will become a paradise neither by persuasion nor by revolution, not even by annihilation of the human race. But if we could somehow gather all the good there is, after all, hidden in each of us sinful human beings, then, I believe, one could build on this a world kinder yet than the world so far. Maybe you will say that it is just a simpleton's philanthropy; well yes, I do belong to those idiots who love human beings because they are human.
--KAREL CAPEK. Why I am Not a Communist(1924)

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