Biggest Waste

Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future.
--Seneca

Become

You become what you love.
--Joanna Macy

Jewel

There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.
--Alan Moore

Malware

Why won't the concept of race go away? Because far too many people still believe that race is genetic, that it is hardware. It isn't. There is no scientific validity to the way people are grouped into races. Race is software. But it has been firmly programmed into people in subtle ways from childhood. It is, therefore, firmware. And a human malware.
--Pete Germantown

Height

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.
--Robert Frost

Open

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
--E.B. White

Fringe Benefits

The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures.
--Rebecca Solnit

Dial Up

There's absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it's going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you're alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.
--Joanna Macy

Prove

The evidence is overwhelming. And that's what's so humiliating. We need to prove through demonstrations and arguments how oppressed we are to white people so they will listen, but this practice of proving that you're treated as an inferior in America--it does something to you.
--Peter Mosley

Flawed

I think deep down inside, people understand how flawed they are. I think the more benign you make somebody, the less truthful it is.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Plants Something

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
--Thomas Merton

Stories

We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money and no human rights--except in the common imagination of human beings.
--Yuval Noah Harari

Words

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
--Aldous Huxley

Superstition

Of course, racism, being a superstition, has never been contingent upon facts.
--Jelani Cobb

Race

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
--Chris Rock

Leaving Behind

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
--Rebecca Solnit

Collective

Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
--Simone Weil

Shift

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
--Tom Stoppard

Choices

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
--Thomas Merton

"Hope"

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
--Emily Dickinson

Really

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
--Margery Williams

Real

We all sort of feel like we're contraptions, like we pasted ourselves together--a little bit from here, a little bit from there--and then, if you're very lucky, along comes someone who loves you the right way, and then you're real.
--Mike Nichols

Truth

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
--Gloria Steinem

Writing

I can't discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.
--Leonard Cohen

Expert

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
--Niels Bohr

Stillness

Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources--it's a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.
--Pico Iyer

Email

Email is a refugee from the open, interoperable, less-controlled "web we lost." It's an exciting landscape of freedom amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services.
--Alexis C. Madrigal

To Love

There is always something left to love.
--Gabriel García Márquez

Language

Language is everyday magic.
--David Hallerman

Affection

Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.
--Mark Twain

Style

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
--Gore Vidal

Unknown

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
--Rebecca Solnit

New App

I don't want a new app to help me do work; I want different ways to think about work so I can get more done.
--Frank Chimero

Shadow

We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me.
--Anne Lamott

Enchantment

As well as the literature of authenticity, there is a literature of enchantment, which invites the reader to participate in the not-real in order to wake from a dream of reality to the ineffability, strangeness and brevity of life on Earth.
--Marcel Theroux

Useful

You know what's useful, to sane people? Hospitals, schools, trains, parks, classes, art, books, clean air, fresh water ... purpose, meaning, dignity. If you can't attain that stuff, what good are five hundred aisles, channels, or megamalls?
--Umair Haque

Imagined

Without an imagined picture of the future, our civilization would not exist.
--Dan Falk

Detection

What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether.
--Rebecca Solnit

I Am

I am, plus my circumstances.
--Jose Ortega y Gasset

Outside Eden

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
--Mark Twain

Journalism

The entire point of journalism--the very thing that distinguishes it from the closely related fields of fiction and public relations--is that it presents the public with things that are true. They don't necessarily have to be important truths, of course, but they need, at minimum, to not be anti-truths, falsehoods fostered by a corporation that takes in $70 billion every year in service of selling a good no one needs and no one should want.
--Tim Marchman

Nature

What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
--Rebecca Solnit

Mixed Feelings

American pop culture leaves little room for mixed feelings, thereby inciting mixed feelings every step of the way.
--Heather Havrilesky

Excellent

I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.
--Jerry Seinfeld (acceptance speech for Clio award, October 2014)

Capitalism

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
--Walter Benjamin

Long Enough

Like anything else, you do it long enough, you will take it for granted, or there will be aspects of it that are grinding.
--Jon Stewart

Everything

You need to write everything and then take out as much as you can so that what's left really pings. I can't explain why that works, but it sometimes works in performance as well.
--Emma Thompson

Buildings

When we deal with buildings we deal with decisions taken long ago for remote reasons.
--Stewart Brand

Vulnerability

In any complex person, there's a combination of vulnerability and strength, and it's those people who show their vulnerability that are the strongest.
--Edoardo Ponti

Imaginary

All the different methods by which societies in history classified people into a hierarchy of groups have been based on imaginary stories. They do not reflect objective reality.
--Yuval Noah Harari

Intolerance

Intolerance may be as old as religion itself.
--Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama)

Transformation

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
--Rebecca Solnit

Exist

Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?
Because it exists.
--Leo Tolstoy

Capitalism

The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.
--Simone Weil

Empathy

The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness, rather than as a marker of civilization.
--Nicholas Kristof

Libertarian

Being a libertarian is wedded to an epistemological humility that proceeds from the assumption that we don't know as much as we think we do, and so you have to be really cautious about policies that seek to completely reshape the world. It's better to run trials and experiments.
--Nick Gillespie

Anticipating

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
--John Maynard Keynes

Embarrassed

The trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
--John Steinbeck

Sweet Warmth

I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach.
--Roger Angell

Center

Only the fool will try to define himself only with words. Music is at the center of everyone's soul.
--Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg

Change

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.
--Mark Twain

Not Desolate

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.
--E.B. White

Slowness

Slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don't get measured and can't be bought.
--Rebecca Solnit

Shadows

Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.
--Junichiro Tanizaki

Bear Fruit

Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.
--Rebecca Solnit

Phantom

Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements--inferences, guesses, deductions--it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.
--Alan W. Watts

Nobody

It's really wonderful to be able to be nobody, and then have a moment when I can be somebody, and then go right back to being nobody again. It's like stepping into the phone booth and changing into my costume.
--Natalie Merchant

Unanticipated

I don't know what's coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn't know the soil held.
--Rebecca Solnit

Buried

We are in a media culture where we are buried in information but we know nothing. Because of that superficiality, we expect heroes to be perfect, but they're not. They are a strange combination of strengths and weaknesses.
--Ken Burns

Time

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
--Seneca

Error

Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
--Brian Eno

Find

The world is full of souls who struggle to find the younger person they once were within the body of the older person they have become.
--Jennifer Finney Boylan

Cargo Cult

People worship the Internet like a cargo cult. It's this thing that they have that brings them free stuff, and they think it's magic. It's beyond rational thought and reason...and they have no sense that behind all that free stuff are the drowned ships and sailors.
--David Lowery

Truths

There are also two kinds of truths: truths of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.
--Gottfried Leibniz

Machine

Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it.
--Robert M. Pirsig

Emergency

I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.
--Abraham Lincoln

Missing Here

As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I know, should I know, that I don't know? Just what am I missing here?
--Margaret Heffernan

Our Days

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
--Annie Dillard

Attention

Attention is the real currency of social-media companies, and it can be mercilessly capricious, particularly among the most coveted demographic of all, youth.
--Matt Buchanan

Evidence

Faith asks people to consider that the evidence of their senses is wrong.
--T. M. Luhrmann

Our Age

Most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment, will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality.
--Ann Druyan

The Act

As far as your brain is concerned, the act of remembering is indeed very similar to the act of imagining the future.
--Dan Falk

Outweigh

To me it seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments.
--Isaac Asimov

No End

There is an illusion of "end," a stasis seemingly like death. But it is only an illusion. Everything, at this crucial point, lies in the attitude which we assume towards the moment.
--Henry Miller

Circuitous

People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange.
--Rebecca Solnit

Realm of Time

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.
--Abraham Heschel

Translated

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.
--John Donne

The Muse

You're best when you're not in charge. The ego locks the muse.
--Robin Williams

Argue

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.
―Alan Moore

Spirits

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.
--Johann von Goethe

Change

Often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul.
--Pat Barker

Heart

Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.
--Chögyam Trungpa

Security

The basic reality is that most of humanity has always heard a voice inside themselves telling them that the best path to security and safety is to love others and show generosity, and a counter voice that tells us that the only path to security is domination and control over others.
--Michael Lerner

Time

If you were to spend an hour alone with the loud tick of a clock, or better yet, if you could spend an hour completely alone with an hourglass, watching the sands of time quickly slip through that vessel, and realize that 100 years from now you and I will both be gone, then you would begin to appreciate that time is the only thing you really do have and that you alone can do anything you wish with the time that is yours.
--William J. Reilly

Worth

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.
--Joan Didion

Above Water

I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.
--Katherine Anne Porter

Grace

Considering the potentially momentous nature of even the smallest decisions we make, we ought to be terrified and humbled, we ought to be filled with gratitude for every grace we receive.
--Dean Koontz

Play

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it.
--Charlie Chaplin

Impermanence

An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. If we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster.
--Mark Epstein

Laugh

Making raspberries, the sound that children use to take down pomposity, is one of the first noises infants make. We must laugh at the unbearable.
--Martin Rowson

Suffering

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local, political intervention.
--Susan Sontag

Tragic

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
--D.H. Lawrence

Bad Tools

My world is laden with bad tools, because my culture is simultaneously obsessed with productivity and novelty. It is a perfect vector for fixation, because the failure of a tool only feeds the desire for new tools. Meaning, I get to feel honorable in my vigilant search for productivity while scratching my itch for novelty.
--Frank Chimero

Doubt

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.
--Simone Weil

Ponder

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.
--Edan Lepucki

Counting

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
--Gottfried Leibniz

Gimmick

Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.
--John Updike

Story

No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to a better story.
--John Hagel

The Story

At any given moment, you have the power to say: This is not how the story is going to end.
--Chris Mason Miller

Wisdom

Wisdom, in our modern world, may boil down to recognizing that LOL and fail and trashy and omg don't actually represent different categories of human experience.
--Heather Havrilesky

Bliss

If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss.
--Saul Bellow

Mockery

We should all mock death as much as we can, because in the end death makes a mockery of all of us.
--Bill Paxton

Good Days

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
--Annie Dillard

Decent Human

It's insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn't it conceivable a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better?
--Isaac Asimov

Passage

To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.
--Dan Falk

Silent

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
--Colum McCann

Paths of Change

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
--Rebecca Solnit

All Your Might

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.
--Ecclesiastes 9:10

The Deal

Before you sell a deal you have to live the deal. You have to believe in it, because, if you don't believe in it, you can't sell it.
--Mel Weinberg

Story

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
--Rebecca Solnit

Fundamentalist

A fundamentalist group, although it may not kill anyone, although it may not strike anyone, is violent. The mental structure of fundamentalists is violence in the name of God.
--Pope Francis

Take Care

In the end, if you take care,
You can be happy or unhappy anywhere.
--Tracey Thorn

Free

When I call myself a male feminist, I'm not doing it because I think I'm going to save women. I'm doing it because I think it's important for men to acknowledge that as long as women aren't free, men won't be either.
--Noah Berlatsky

The Needs

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
--Simone Weil

Poetry

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
--G.K. Chesterton

Furious

To be furious
Is to be frighted out of fear, and in that mood
The dove will peck the estridge.
--William Shakespeare

Cynical

I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization, you can't just swallow it whole.
--Frank Zappa

Perverse

It seems especially perverse that people purporting to be Christian, a religion that vows to help the poor and heal the sick, should be so violently against helping the poor and healing the sick.
--Eric Idle

Despair

Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don't matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable.
--Rebecca Solnit

Light

Love is not consolation, it is light.
--Simone Weil

Boredom

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
--Wendell Phillips

Sin

In the Bible, the words "sin" and "iniquity," from which the modern word "inequity" arises, are used almost interchangably. There is a good reason for this.
--Sam Simple

Future

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
--Virginia Woolf

Values

The idea that the private sector, the free market, on its own has all the solutions is just a myth. When it's just about money, there are no values.
--Tim Wu

The Unknown

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
--Rebecca Solnit

Ghosts

The ghosts that haunt most of us aren't the dead or even the shadows of some other dimension. They're the ghosts of who we weren't but might have been, the ghosts of other selves glimpsed briefly out the window, before everything shimmers and we are drawn away again.
--Todd VanDerWerff

Not Just

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.
--Simone Weil

Fool's Gold

In 1942, in Brno, my father's family hid a man in the rabbit hutch for a week, until he could be moved. That's all I know of the story, and now it's all I'll ever know. With no one to check me, error will spread like weeds. Which is how the past is transmuted into fiction, and then the fool's gold of history.
--Mark Slouka

Make Up Your Mind

The time to make up your mind about people--is never.
--Philip Barry

Largeness

The Four Horsemen of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.
--Rebecca Solnit

Intelligence

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
--Simone Weil

Involved

You're asking people to be involved. They love that--it's part of our human nature. People want to be asked to do something bigger than themselves.
--Jane Kleeb

On The Edge

Smart people are always on the edge a little bit. I've become more confident in some ways as I've gotten older, but you never can take anything for granted. You always have a little bit of doubt, if you have any sense.
--Robert Duvall

Confederate

The Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of "useful killing," but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Curiosity

She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.
--Gabriel García Márquez

Grand Mystery

Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don't know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.
--Rebecca Solnit

Poetry

Poetry is the social act of the solitary man.
--John Butler Yeats

Key Rules

I think one of the key rules to learn in the art of party-going is when to leave with dignity.
--Philip French

Religion

Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. Faith is almost entirely devoid of content.
--Stephen Prothero

Music

The "omnivore" is the new model for the music connoisseur, and one's diversity of listening across the high/low spectrum is now seen as the social signal of refined taste.
--Eric Harvey

Delay

Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.
--Rebecca Solnit

Difficulty

The hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism.
--Will Self

Other

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
--Simone Weil

Rage

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
--James Baldwin

Why

Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?
--Anonymous

True Self

Is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?
--Virginia Woolf

Tools

Simple implements--a hammer, a lever, a text editor--assume little and ask less. The tool doesn't force the hand. But digital tools for information work are spookier. The tools can force the mind, since they have an ideological perspective baked into them. To best use the tool, you must think like the people who made it.
--Frank Chimero

Know

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.
--Michel Foucault

Naming

It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.
--Rebecca Solnit

Ideology

The idea that you need people making 10 million in compensation to work is pure ideology.
--Thomas Piketty

A Life

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.
--E.B. White (Charlotte's Web)

State of Grace

Think of love as a state of grace; not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.
--Gabriel García Márquez

Polemical

Making a list is not merely a numerical act but also a polemical one.
--Richard Brody

Pal

Look, pal, we've always known--the Framers knew--that liberty is a fragile thing. You can't give up.
--William Brennan

Deified

In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which becomes the only rule.
--Pope Francis

Well-Being

Judaism, like all religion, is not the bottom line. It is a tool in our toolbox for human well-being and being helpful beings.
--Amichai Lau-Lavie

Capitalism

No single device has done so much to secure the future of capitalism as this tax.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

Profoundly Human

The pursuit of scientific knowledge is as personal an act as lifting a paintbrush or writing a poem, and they are both profoundly human.
--Simon Critchley

Ambition

In the troubled sea of the world's ambition, men rise by gravity, sink by levity.
--Lewis Lapham

Children

It is so important to speak to children as humans from the time that they are really young. I feel that people speak to children like they are objects or that they don't notice things. Children notice everything. They are so sensitive. They are so aware and very sophisticated. I don't mean that they know how to run an iPad. I mean sophisticated in an emotional and intellectual way. They are forming a vision of the world all the time.
--Natalie Merchant

Society

It is obviously impractical in the federal government of these states, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all: Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.
--George Washington (from his letter transmitting the Constitution to the Congress)

Productivity

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
--Robert M. Solow (Nobel Prize winning economist)

Everybody With Eyes

The country needs some combination of the WPA and the space program to put itself back together again. Real unemployment is stubbornly in the low double digits. Meanwhile, bridges fall into rivers, and sinkholes devour houses, and 127-year old gas pipes explode and kill people. And yet we're too lazy, or too goddamn cheap, to tax ourselves to rebuild what everybody with eyes knows needs to be rebuilt.
--Charles P. Pierce

Hard Thing

It's a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
--John Steinbeck

Reality

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
--Albert Einstein

Faith

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
--E.B. White

Capital and Labor

One of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labor. They would want labor to be diminished because labor's a cost. And if labor is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.
--David Simon

Too Short

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
--John Burroughs

Tradition

Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we know from history's darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost.
--Adam Frank

Job

I was very careful never to take an interesting job.
If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
--Mary Oliver

Drama

Drama isn't in the event; it's in the aftermath of the event.
--Robert and Michelle King

Play Of Tolerance

The moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call "a play of tolerance," whether in science, literature, politics or religion.
--Simon Critchley

Order

I am impressed by the degree to which outer order controls inner calm.
--Gretchen Rubin

Gray

After a while, you realize that you spend most of your life in gray. Or at least if you're smart, you do.
--Rick Raemisch

Time

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption.
--Mohsin Hamid

Brand Preferences

The machine of consumerism is designed to encourage us all to believe that our preferences are significant and self-revealing; that a taste for Coke over Pepsi, or for KFC over McDonald's, means something about us; that our tastes comprise, in sum, a kind of aggregate expression of our unique selfhood.
--Eleanor Catton

Endanger Liberty

The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes--tramps and millionaires.
--The Omaha Platform of the Populist Party (1892)

Famine

The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.
--John Mitchel

Arrogant

There's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
--Doris Lessing

Rewrites

Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain.
--Nic Pizzolatto

Won't Last

There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.
--Jules Renard

Nothingness

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
--E. M. Cioran

Writing

Writing is just a kind of dress, in which ideas and words are clothed.
--Irving Finkel

Wake to sleep

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
--Theodore Roethke

Lonely Mind

Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
--John Steinbeck

Reality

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
--Samuel Johnson

Smash

I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.
--W. H. Auden (1966)

War

One more reason to hate war is that it destroys Nature--the fields, the deer, the lake, the trees--and, with it, alas, the heavens, the resting place of our souls.
--Henri Cole

Overturn

It is vastly easier to find new words than it is to overturn old habits.
--Verlyn Klinkenborg

Unspoken

Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of people, and ours is no exception.
--James Baldwin

Consumers

As practitioners of consumption, Americans lead poorly edited lives. We end up with basements and attics full of items that looked amazing in the store or online, but that lost their sparkle once they left the Bubble Wrap.
--David Carr

Politeness

Politeness is another word for deception. The point is to formalize social relations so you don't have to reveal your true self.
--James W. Pennebaker

Attachment

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love.
--Roger Angell

Our Society

That notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years.
--David Simon

Animals

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
--Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

Let Go

We must let go: Let go of our past, become reconciled with ourselves, and accept that we will be diminished in one respect in order to grow in another.
--Marie de Hennezil

Mistaken

We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.
--Simon Critchley

Held

We fought all night and then we danced
in your kitchen.
You were as much in my hands
as water or darkness or nothing
can ever be held.
--Jeffrey Foucault

Miracle

Until we really realize what a miracle it is that we even exist, all our petty disputes and all of our selfish pursuits--everything will perpetuate and we're going to kill ourselves off.
--Natalie Merchant

Time

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
--Charles Darwin

Conversable Animal

A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
--Jeremy Bentham

Uncertainty

Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
--Dr. Jacob Bronowski

Mystery

All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.
--Meryl Streep

If I'm Alive

This isn't everything, there will be another film, there will be another relationship, or I'll die and then I'll be dead. But if I'm alive I know life is going to keep throwing things at me.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Alone

Sometimes when I see a great movie or a great play I think: being human means you're really alone.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Reinvent

There's that thing with being younger. You think it's all or nothing. You think all your eggs are in one basket when you're young. You're gambling. Whereas when you're older you realize you can reinvent--you think, this feeling I have is going to pass.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Human Condition

Well, I think everyone struggles with self-love. I think that's pretty much the human condition, you know, waking up and trying to live your day in a way that you can go to sleep and feel okay about yourself.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Comrade

Old friends, we say, are best, when some sudden disillusionment shakes our faith in a new comrade.
--Gelett Burgess

Open, Closed

You'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been hurt by remaining closed.
--Martha Beck

Not Alone

We read to know that we are not alone.
--William Nicholson

Print

Print is not dead, it simply has some very specific attributes that need to be leveraged.
--David Carr

Free

Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we're being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.
--Edward Snowden

Anti-Christ

I'm not saying President Obama is the anti-Christ--in fact, I'm sure he's not--because the anti-Christ is going to have higher poll numbers, according to the Bible.
--Robert Jeffress (Texas megachurch pastor)

Simple

The mere fact of a poem appearing simple in language and construction bears no relation whatsoever to the profundity of ideas it may contain.
--Charles Causley

Food

Basically, if you arrive from Mars and design a food system, you probably couldn't design a worse one than what we have today on Earth. There is enough food overall in the world to feed everyone. But 900 million people still don't have enough to eat, and 1 billion people are obese. It's a crazy situation.
--Max Lawson (head of advocacy and public policy, Oxfam)

Care

Did you find that the universe
Doesn't care at all?
Did you find that if you don't care
This whole wrong world will fall?
--Tom Rapp

Tension

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Centralizing

Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.
--Jaron Lanier

Playing

I've known since I was a little boy that the grim reaper is playing by my side. Time is running out for me. While I may not have the courage to keep this reality before me most of the time, every molecule of my heart knows this.
--Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg

Forgive

To look good, forgive everybody. It's the best beauty secret.
--Jacqueline Bisset

Technology

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude.
--Mohsin Hamid

Wholeness

Curing and healing are not the same thing. To cure is to remove disease. To heal is to make whole, and wholeness can belong as much to the infirm as to the healthy.
--James Carroll

The Present

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because that's a way of diminishing the present.
--Carrie Brownstein

Listen

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that's only if you're very lucky. And you listen very hard. Life teaches elliptically, epigrammatically, retrospectively.
--Mark Slouka

Spirit

There are certain things in society that need to be torn down--these things that come in between the human spirit and people truly identifying with each other in a pure way.
--Billie Joe Armstrong

Privacy

Privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
--Edward Snowden

Peace

True peace is not a balance of opposing forces. It is not a lovely façade which conceals conflicts and divisions. Peace calls for daily commitment.
--Pope Francis