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