Choice

When you have a choice to make and you don't make it, that in itself is a choice.
--William James

Paradise

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
--Jean Paul Richter

Spiritual

Calvin: Yep, Christmas is just around the corner.
Calvin: And what better way to celebrate a religious holiday than with a month of frenzied consumerism!
Hobbes: I'm surprised other religions haven't picked up on that.
Calvin: Getting loads of loot is a very spiritual experience for me.
--Bill Watterson

Dust and Rainbows

Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,
Help us to see
That without the dust the rainbow
Would not be.
--Langston Hughes

Other

I am an other.
--Arthur Rimbaud

Information

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
--Herbert Simon

Hedge

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
--Tim Kreider

The Oldest Story

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
--Bill Moyers

Belongs

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
--Walt Whitman

Words

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate.
--Doris Lessing

Comparison

Comparison is the death of joy.
--Mark Twain

Self-Respect

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
--Joan Didion

Progress

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
--David Simon

Altered

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
--Nelson Mandela

Choice

There is a statistical theory, degrees of freedom, that proves that every single choice you make narrows your choices (the choices you might make in the future), rendering having it all impossible.
--Delia Ephron

Trust

Sometimes it's those things we least understand that deserve our deepest trust. Isn't that what love and wonder tell us, too?
--Pico Iyer

Repetition

My rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency.
--W.G. Sebald

Attention

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
--Mary Oliver

A Prediction

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
--George Saunders

Dance

When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.
--Paulo Coelho

Stillness

We have forgotten how to be alone in our thoughts. All the best work comes out of that rich stillness of waiting.
--Meg Hutchinson

Generation

The torch has been passed to a new generation.
--John F. Kennedy

Hope To Say

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
--E.B. White

Time Has Come

Comprehensive health insurance is an idea whose time has come in America.
--Richard Nixon (special message to Congress on February 6, 1974)

Superfluous

It's the superfluous for which we live.
--Bertolt Brecht

Now

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now.
--Doris Lessing

Happy

Having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
--Bill Watterson

Nature

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
--E.B. White

Enough

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
--Mary Oliver

Market Forces

One of the greatest acts of neoliberal hypnosis over the past 40 years has been convincing almost everyone in mainstream politics, conservatives and liberals alike, that it was both fiscally prudent and morally necessary to subject the entire public sphere to "market forces."
--Andrew O'Hehir

Prestige

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
--Paul Graham

War

War is like love: It always finds a way.
--Bertolt Brecht

The More

The more someone knows about any given subject, the likelier he is to include a lot of boring, hard-to-follow caveats, complicating factors and exceptions in discussing it.
--Tim Kreider

Imperfect

I refuse to accept that the only good response to an imperfect technology is to abandon it.
--Alexis C. Madrigal

Attention

The poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions.
--Daniel Goleman

News

If it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news--car crashes, domestic violence--that you should start worrying.
--Bruce Schneier

Complexity

The complexity of things--the things within things--just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
--Alice Munro

Home

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
--James Baldwin

Ghosts

It was, perhaps, a natural thought that the approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar fireside.
--James George Frazer

History

Don't study history to boost your self-esteem. Study history to lose your religion. Or maybe in the end, to gain it. I am not religious at all. But seeing the limits of all of us, you start to understand why people might appeal to some higher, more certain, more fierce, invention.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Cooperation

Cooperation played an immense role in our evolutionary past. That is the reason democracy has a future, while "free market" competition has been exposed as a serpent that eats its own tail.
--Erik Reece

Discover

He who understands everything about his subject cannot write it. I write as much to discover as to explain.
--Arthur Miller

Commitments

If there is a lesson baseball can offer us, it's one about our deepest commitments; that they're arbitrary, and contingent, but we're no less committed to them for that.
--Jordan Ellenberg

Moment

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
--Alan Watts

Capitalism

Many believe that capitalism is synonymous with free enterprise and democracy. Capitalism is neither free enterprise nor democracy. After all, China is now a capitalist country. No one believes that China is a democratic country. This conflation has allowed all attempts to attenuate the deficiencies of capitalism to be construed as that grand evil, "socialism" or communism.
--Egberto Willies

Border

Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others.
--Robert Anton Wilson

The Soft Animal

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.
--Mary Oliver

Living Thing

Government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.
--Woodrow Wilson

Told You

One of the lies people tell is, "I don't like to say I told you so." It is in fact one of the few pleasures that improve with age. I don't have to take a pill before, during or after I do it.
--Barney Frank

Hoax

One of the biggest hoaxes of American history is that the Civil War ended back in 1865. Unfortunately, it has not ended yet. What was achieved back then was an armistice.
--Stephan Richter

Wholeness

There is no clear distinction between mind and spirit; but there is a quality of mind that is more than thought and the process of thought: this quality involves feelings and the wholeness in which the life of man has its being.
--Howard Thurman

Really

Nothing changes really about love.
--Alice Munro

Moral

This country is moralistic, but not moral.
--Linda Ronstadt

Multiple Causes

Everything arises in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions; nothing exists as a singular, independent entity.
--Buddhist teaching of Pratītyasamutpāda

Mutters

A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"
--Abraham Lincoln (1860)

In This World

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
--Mary Oliver

Humanity

The political sphere is where you engage with your humanity. You have not merely a right, you have an obligation to participate, to make sure the people, as a whole, are able to make good decisions, and pass good laws and treat you as a human.
--Eric J. Miller

The People

Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
--Thomas Jefferson

Concealed

Being in love is like discovering a concealed ballroom in a house you've long inhabited.
--Russell Brand

Soul

A soul that is not confused is not a soul.
--Saigyo

Stupid Kids

When a third of Republicans believe that "Some people are hiding the truth about the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in order to advance a political agenda," then it's time to treat them like the pariahs that they are. The inmates shouldn't run the asylum. The stupid kids shouldn't get to teach the rest of the school.
--Lee Papa

Stop

Remember, the Republicans aren't threatening economic calamity, because they want to rein in spending. They're threatening economic calamity, because they want to stop poor and sick Americans from getting health insurance.
--Matthew O'Brien

Inferiors

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
--Plato

Neutrality

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
--Elie Weisel

What You Love

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.
--Robert Anton Wilson

Injuries

I just don't have the same energy to be as neurotic. You have to put triage on your injuries.
--Junot Díaz

Change

Temporary despair can be a useful response to life: To feel for a time that you are completely defeated and there is no hope can actually be a precursor to meaningful change.
--Cary Tennis

Conscience

The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.
--Pope Francis

Suspend

Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It's when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.
--Delia Ephron

Change

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
--Alan Watts

Bullshit

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit.
--Harry Crews

Love Something

It should be known that it is impossible for human nature not always to love something.
--Origen (3rd century theologian)

Phone

It makes me sad that there are moments in our lives where we're not present because we're looking at a phone.
--Charlene deGuzman

Racism

There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.
--Benjamin Jealous

Suffering

The only thing worse than assuming you could get the better of suffering, I began to think (though I'm no Buddhist), is imagining you could do nothing in its wake.
--Pico Iyer

Ridiculous

The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.
--Guglielmo Marconi (1912)

National

Only with the struggle for national self-determination did it come to be believed that every human being had to belong to a group defined in opposition to others.
--John Gray

Eight

Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments (or "10 Judeo-Christian Moral Injunctions You Need in Your Life Right Now") was surely aware that it could just as well have been eight, or eleven, or seventy-seven commandments.
--Mark O'Connell

Dystopia

Whatever technological dystopia awaits us, it's at once hilarious and mortifying to think that the road there might be paved with asinine status updates, cat pictures and listicles.
--Willy Staley

History

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
--Seamus Heaney

Invaded

Man, I wish Bush was the president. He would have reacted right away. He may have invaded Cyprus or Jordan instead of Syria by mistake, but you know he would have done something at least.
--Abu Bassam (resident of Homs, Syria)

True

A thing is not necessarily true because someone dies for it.
--Oscar Wilde

Meaning

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
--Bill Watterson

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
--Langston Hughes

Position

When White House advisers formulate a position that they believe is correct but which manages to repel everyone, they say that they have "hit the sweet spot."
--David Remnick

Whole

I'd rather be whole than good.
--Carl Jung

Judgmental

You're judgmental, and I mean that in the best possible way. We're told it's good to make judgments about everything else: music, food, politics, clothing. Well, why the hell not judge people? People can be irrational and ignorant and irritating.
--Kim Brooks

Virtues

Adulation of our imaginary virtues, despite all the evidence to the contrary, continues to be one of the oddest things about this country.
--Charles Simic

Why

The day will finally arrive. It may come early in life or it may be the last day of your life, but sooner or later you will ask some very simple questions, to wit--What does my life mean? Why am I the way I am?
--Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg

Loving

Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean--
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
--Langston Hughes

Staging

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.
--Teju Cole

Business

There is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.
--Milton Friedman

Wrong

Big Data allows us to be wrong with infinite precision.
--Nicola Hughes

Knowing

I was doing, I believed, what we all want to do, which is find a way to capture things before they dissolve, to not lose our lives to the relentless pace that keeps us from knowing who we are and what we want.
--Michael Paterniti

Small Change

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We, who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Maturity

A man's maturity consists of regaining the seriousness one had when a child at play.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Suspicions

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
--Robert Anton Wilson

Entropy

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.
--Philip K. Dick

History

The point of history is to learn from it, not to proceed as if we were still living in it.
--Jelani Cobb

Time and Memory

Back at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory...And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.
--Wendell Berry

Failures

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded...sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
--George Saunders

Effrontery

As we read the newspapers, and we see the effrontery with which money and power carry their ends, and ride over honesty and good-meaning, morals and religion seem to become mere shrieking and impotence.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Too Young

But just before the end, even treason might be worth a try.
This country is too young to die.
--Phil Ochs

Amazing

Like most amazing things,
It's easy to miss and easy to mistake.
For when things are really great,
It just means everything's in its place.
--Aimee Mann

At Any Time

Anything can happen at any time. There is no sure thing. Everything you hold dear is at risk, everything is vulnerable. It can all slip through your fingers.
--Daniel Smith

Survive

You have to love the world to want to survive.
--Matt Zoller Seitz

Sloth

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth.
--Charles Simic

Progress

Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world's religions.
--John Gray

Created

All religions and all churches are created by human beings. They're not that different from, say, the whole legal culture or the medical culture or the scientific culture.
--Joyce Carol Oates

Found

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.
--Sidney Lanier

Uniquely

While Americans are just 5 percent of the world's population, we house almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners, making us No. 1 in something, anyway. Either we are a uniquely evil people...or we have some uniquely awful laws and social policies.
--Andrew O'Hehir

Click

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
--Jeff Hammerbacher

Attentive

Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

The Edge

It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it.
--Charlie Munger

Drool

Day 19. I have successfully conditioned my master to smile and write in his book every time I drool.
--Pavlov's Dog

Future

People give less weight to the future, but that's a brain bug.
--Peter Singer

Work

Work was traditionally seen as a curse or an obligation for which we received payment. Nonwork was viewed as an experience of freedom for which we pay but that gives us pleasure.
--Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

History

History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but--everyone insists--the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair.
--John Gray

Controversial

We know that climate change is real. We know creationism is wrong. These are no longer scientific controversies. When people call these "controversial topics," that's misleading. They are only controversial politically. And politics is not necessarily evidence-based.
--Phil Plait

Attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
--Simone Weil

Cooperation

"Survival of the fittest"--a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation.
--Russell Brand

Listening

Each act of listening to music may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future.
--Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor

Yes

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
--e. e. cummings

Technology

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Constantly

You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world.
--Joss Whedon

Lying

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Creatures

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Direction

There's no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.
--Oprah Winfrey

Data Mining

A founding principle of our jurisprudence is that you're innocent until proved guilty; data mining is based on the opposite principle.
--Reed Hundt (former chairman of the FCC)

Two Things

What I believe is that all people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: curious and kind.
--Roger Ebert

Honesty

Unalloyed honesty is the iridium of the information economy--vanishingly rare, and therefore precious.
--Tim Kreider

Yourself

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
--e. e. cummings

Memory

When you have a memory of something, you are actually having a memory of your last memory of it.
--Sarah Polley

Fart Around

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Suffering

Judgment is just a recipe for suffering: start with our dissatisfaction over how a person happens to be and mix in our desire for them to be otherwise.
--Toni Bernhard

Peace

If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.
--Joss Whedon

Meaning

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
--David Foster Wallace

Wake Up

My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.
--Miles Davis

Ingredient

The active ingredient in broccoli is broccoli.
--David Katz

Stupid

If you say that money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time: You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to go on doing things you don't like doing--which is stupid!
--Alan Watts

Short and Long

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
--Pablo Neruda

Home

It all seems so very arbitrary. I applied for a job at this company because they were hiring. I took a desk at the back because it was empty. But, no matter how you get there or where you end up, human beings have this miraculous gift to make that place home.
--Creed Bratton

Story

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion... It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
--Margaret Atwood

Put Off

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
--Mark Twain

Amateurs

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.
--Chuck Close

Image

God created man in his own image. And man returned the favor.
--George Bernard Shaw

Perfect

Seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
--Jaron Lanier

Society

The happiness of society is the end of government.
--John Adams

Freedom

The trouble with the libertarian approach is that you have the freedom to go anywhere you want, but there aren't any roads.
--Anonymous

Writing

I've never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.
--John Updike

Pleasure

There comes a time when speaking one's mind ceases to be a moral duty, and becomes a pleasure.
--Oscar Wilde

In Search

Music is love in search of a word.
--Sidney Lanier

My Life

My salvation is to not take anything personally, except my life.
--Sister Patrice

Sense

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.
--e. e. cummings

True Measure

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.
--Philip K. Dick

Only Love

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Portrait

In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing.
--Jean-Paul Satre

Heart

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
--Steve Jobs

Quietly Thinking

Like many people, I like to set aside a few hours every day, generally between 3 and 6 a.m., to lie quietly thinking about everything that could go horribly wrong with my life and all the ways in which I am negligent and reprehensible. I have spasms of panic over things I shouldn't have written, or, worse, things I should have; I regret having spent all the money and wonder where more money might ever conceivably come from; I wish I'd kissed girls I didn't, as long ago as 1985.
--Tim Kreider

Words

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.
--Philip K. Dick

Music

Remember, information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
--Frank Zappa

Spirit-Matter

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule.
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Prickling

With all soulful work, I have found that the line between knowing and not knowing looks sharp and crisp only from a distance. Up close, there is a blurring that occurs as we near that line, a knowing that is not yet a knowing but more a prickling in the soul.
--Suzanne Clothier

Fiction

Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.
--Ted Gup

False Notion

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov

Wrong City

What a Bostonian means when he or she says "They messed with the wrong city" is "You don't think this changes anything, do you?"
--Dennis Lehane

Cry

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, "You'd better cry at my memorial service."
--Roger Ebert

Anew

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
--Abraham Lincoln

Everything

Everything in life is just for a while.
--Philip K. Dick

Words

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought.
--Eric Hoffer

Children

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
--James Baldwin

Privatize

Let's privatize her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted.
--Ken Loach

Advertising

Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits.
--Jaron Lanier

Faith

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don't feel that way. "Faith" is neutral. All depends on what is believed in.
--Roger Ebert

The Difference

I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.
--Philip K. Dick

Ethical Infants

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
--General Omar N. Bradley

Personal

When people say, "It's business, it's not personal," that just means it's not personal for them. It can be personal for me.
--R.A. Dickey

Privacy

Privacy is delayed gratification.
--Alessandro Acquisti

Laugh

Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though.
--Eric Weiner

Perfect

We all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions and customs current in the land where we live. There we always see the perfect religion, the perfect political system, the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything.
--Michel de Montaigne

Fashion

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
--Larry Ellison (chairman, Oracle)

Poetry

Prose is a house, poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it.
--Anne Carson

Beautiful

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
--Alain de Botton

Heroism

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.
--Arthur Ashe

Manners

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.
—William Faulkner (The Big Sleep, spoken by Philip Marlowe/Humphrey Bogart)

Pretext

Much of the world's elite understand exactly what they're doing: i.e., use the economic catastrophe they themselves created as a pretext to kill the welfare state they've despised for 65 years. Nonetheless, a significant chunk of them actually believe they're doing the right thing for everyone.
--Jonathan Schwarz

Horror

We humans can't truly embrace every horror, or else we'd be submerged in a nanosecond by the unspeakable suffering that this world offers.
--Laura Pritchett

Invisible

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
--George Carlin

New Technologies

The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past.
--Stephen Baker

Decently

What makes life worth living are the saints. They can be longtime friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Information

Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but will make you miserable when you don't.
--Michel Serres

Enthusiasm

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
--Benjamin Disraeli

At Heart

Because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
--Anne Frank

Written Inside

The elements that compose us are derived from the birth of stars and the explosion of supernovae. These events are only the beginning of our deep connections to the universe. Written inside of us is the birth of the solar system and workings of the planet itself.
--Neil Shubin

Standard

If you get nothing else out of this, just remember one thing: There is nothing "standard." Everything is negotiable. If they tell you it's not, go find somebody else.
--Stanley Snadowsky

Believe

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
--Isaac Asimov

Its Time

You can't pull a butterfly out of its cocoon; it has to be its time.
--Dr. John Woodall

Work

Even when I do not feel like work, I sit down to it just the same. I cannot wait for inspiration.
--Igor Stravinsky

Copyright

A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion.
--Edith Wharton

Economy

Something has gone terribly wrong when the biggest threat to our American economy is the American Congress.
--Senator Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.)

Secret

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
--James Taylor

Desire

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
--Alan Watts

Examples

I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples.
--Phillip Lopate

Thought

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
--C.S. Lewis

Hours

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.
--William Blake

The Internet

Lonely people have a natural affinity for the Internet. It's always there waiting, patient, flexible, suitable for every mood.
--Roger Ebert

Medium

The medium is the message.
--Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the metaphor.
--Neil Postman

The dominant medium of every age defines the way humans expect the world to be.
--Scott Johnson

Reality

In any relationship, there is one inescapable reality: To love anything is to risk loss.
--Suzanne Clothier

Quiet

The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration--it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
--Tim Kreider

Two Kinds

Among highly intelligent people, there are two kinds of minds, the sharp and the soft. We expect smart people to have minds like swords, made to fight and slash and slay. Soft smart minds, though, are of another, rarer kind. They absorb great quantities of data and opinion, often silently, even sluggishly, and turn them around slowly until a solution appears. Darwin is probably the best instance of the soft style in science history.
--Adam Gopnick

Dark Side

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
--Mark Twain

Reality

Anyone who thinks that there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying reality. We have a new reality, and old infrastructures and old systems.
--Governor Andrew Cuomo

Enjoy

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
--Bertrand Russell

Things

I've simply concluded that we've lost our minds. There is no other way to explain what we, as a civilization (word used in the descriptive sense only), are doing to ourselves. We've become so enamored with our brain's capacity for creating things, that we've given it over totally to do nothing else--to our own demise. So smitten with ourselves, to the point of intoxication.
--Ivermarkt Pasadena

Plausible

Religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That's why they're so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.
--Jared Diamond

Hard Choices

If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.
--Albert Bregman

Capitalism

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
--Bertrand Russell

Tolerant

Don't be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.
--Basil Baker

Sharing

Life is all about sharing moments with those you love. That sharing can involve being in the moment together. But quite often, it's about recounting it after the fact.
--Ryan McGee

Government

To say government must be small is nonsense. Government must be the size necessary to make a society and economy work, and that is not fixed--nor could it possibly have been known by farmers in the late 1700s.
--Jeff Madrick

Is

Love is or it ain't.
--Toni Morrison

Employees

Happy employees make good products.
--Chris King

Tenderness

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.
--Allan Gurganus

Free

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
--Thomas Merton

Change

Governments care only as much as their citizens force them to care. Nothing changes unless we change.
--George Monbiot

Lukewarm

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Beginning

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
--Charles Darwin

Second Amendment

There are three honest interpretations of the Second Amendment, which makes no mention of guns or self-defense:
1. Private citizens can own the types of arms known to the writers of the Constitution in 1790, mostly slow-to-load muskets.
2. Private citizens can own any type of arm, including nuclear arms.
3. Government can make reasonable restrictions on what arms private citizens can own.
--RD

Civilized

I am civilized. My feelings are not.
--Jeanette Winterson

Chance

Perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
--Colum McCann

Once Were

What is it, he wonders,
that we had then and don't have now,
that we once were and are no longer.
--Jack Gilbert

Knowledge, Wisdom

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not using it in a fruit salad.
--Brian O'Driscoll

Prestige

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
--Paul Graham

Guilty

Our leaders now treat climate change as a guilty secret.
--George Monbiot

Work, Play

Most people have the ridiculous notion that anything they do which produces an income is work--and that anything they do outside "working" hours is play. There is no logic to that.
--William J. Reilly

Specific Person

Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self's own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
--Jonathan Franzen

A Part

I am a part of all that I have met.
--Alfred Lord Tennyson

Everything Changes

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.
--Shunryu Suzuki

New Year

It's a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave--let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we're faking them.
--Neil Gaiman