Good Bones

GOOD BONES

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
--Maggie Smith

Engage

To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love.
--Elizabeth Alexander

Sad Stories

"I don't think we need to tell sad stories. Life's too short."
"That's exactly why we have to tell them."
--Ray McKinnon

Abuse

The people who have taken power in the mightiest nation on earth are native speakers of the language of abuse. They live and breathe the rhetoric of control, of gaslighting, of shame. This is how abuse works--not just overtly, but insidiously. It claims territory in your heart. It colonizes your mind until it becomes comfortable. Until it becomes something you can live with, or at least survive.
--Laurie Penny

Trick

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
--Charles Baudelaire

Influence

No, 2016 is not the worst year ever, but it's the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.
--Jia Tolentino

Predictions

Making predictions is a way of fooling yourself into thinking you know.
--Lance Mannion

Running Away

Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.
--Pema Chödrön

Lupus

Homo homini lupus. (Man is wolf to man.)
--Latin proverb

Militant

The paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.
--Richard Hofstadter (1964)

Gas Station

Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.
--Senator John McCain

The Present

Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.
--Leo Tolstoy

Make-Believe

Government requires make-believe. Make believe that the king is divine, make believe that he can do no wrong or make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.
--Edmund S. Morgan

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
--Langston Hughes

Empathy

The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Identity

When you're persecuted on the basis of your identity, you end up feeling that identity more poignantly.
--Iyad el-Baghdadi

Ready

We are oblivious of information until we are ready for it. One day, we feel a resonance, from the soles of the feet to the cranium. Without mediation, without apology, we read ourselves, and know what we know.
--Hilary Mantel

Do Not Do

What is hateful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary.
--Hillel

Plain Speaking

Fake news is propaganda.
The powerful demanding apologies from artists is censorship.
Business dealings while in office are corruption.
Threatening protestors and petitioners is authoritarianism.
Declaring a minority an internal enemy and calling for militarized unity is fascism.
Everything starts with naming these things in public.
Resistance starts with plain speaking.
--Alex Steffen

Obsessing

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives.
--W. H. Auden

Apart

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
--Robert Frost

Kindness

Now is the time for kindness.
--Margaret Edson

Attitude

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
--George Orwell

Fully

We need to mourn all these injuries fully, so that they do not drag us into despair, so repair will be possible.
--Junot Diaz

Voice Be Still

If it be your will
That I speak no more,
And my voice be still
As it was before.
I will speak no more.
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will.
--Leonard Cohen

Long After

Now, I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back.
They're movin' us tomorrow to the tower down the track.
But you'll be hearin' from me, baby, long after I'm gone.
I'll be speakin' to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.
--Leonard Cohen

Darker

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim.
I struggled with some demons,
They were middle-class and tame.
I didn't know I had permission
to murder and to maim.
You want it darker.
We kill the flame.
--Leonard Cohen

White Man

There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code.
Your private life will suddenly explode.
There'll be phantoms, there'll be fires on the road.
And a white man dancing.
--Leonard Cohen

Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
--Theodore Roethke

Other Side

Now I greet you from the other side
Of sorrow and despair,
With a love so vast and shattered
It will reach you everywhere.
--Leonard Cohen

In Love

We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made,
In love we disappear.
--Leonard Cohen

Stubborn

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean.
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Thirst

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change,
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say,
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Holy Places

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Real

It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Pain

Often our pain encourages us to isolate ourselves. The truth of it is our pain is a badge for how we are members of this larger community. Recognizing this and recognizing our shared humanity is not a small insight.
--Junot Diaz

Value

You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.
--Louise Bourgeois

Vote

The vote is precious. It is almost sacred.
--Rep. John Lewis (D-GA)

Service

When it comes to public service, I'm better at the service part than the public part.
--Hillary Clinton

Women

Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies.
--Hillary Clinton

Jesus Himself

You could take Jesus himself and pummel him with tomatoes for decades and he'd come to be known as "that guy who smells like tomatoes."
--Paul King

Vote

A vote is a choice to join a power-seeking coalition. It is not a personal affirmation of a coherent ideology. It is not a moral choice.
--Clay Shirky

Pressure

Pressure lives in the future, not the present tense. If you can live in the moment, then you can enjoy the pleasure of it.
--Joe Maddon

Materials

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
--George Orwell

Attention

The important thing was first to attract attention. Then, having compelled people to notice him, he could proceed to hold their attention by refusing to make the slightest sense.
--Lee Siegel (Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence)

Cleaning

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
--Robert F. Kennedy

Dearer Stuff

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
--Barbara Kingsolver

Escape

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
--Marcus Aurelius

The Same

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same.
--Donald Trump

Brave

It's only during frightening times when you get to find out if your country really deserves to call itself the "home of the brave."
--Phil Klay

Forget

We forget that we don't always know what makes us happy.
--KJ Dell'Antonia

Decency

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
--Christopher Hitchens

Politics

When you have contempt for politics, you often get a politics worthy of contempt.
--Catherine Rampell

Created

We created God, and then pretended God created us.
--Louis Menand

Poet

I'm a poet, and I know it. Hope I don't blow it.
--Bob Dylan

Jew

As a Jew, I'm very judgmental. As a street Jew, doubly so.
--Sidney Lumet

Crisis

Only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
--Milton Friedman

Sign

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
--Honore de Balzac

Coherent

The paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.
--Richard Hofstadter

Caged

Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.
--Tennessee Williams

Remembering

The very act of remembering...gives one the "raw material" needed to construct plausible scenarios of future events and act accordingly.
--Dan Falk

Kindly

No apologies are needed for treating anyone kindly, compassionately and fairly.
--Suzanne Clothier

Lost

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
--Rebecca Solnit

Unless

I feel safe unless I start watching TV, after which, if I let my reptilian brain take over, I feel a bit panicked.
--Jack Shafer

The Hero

By overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.
--Joseph Campbell

Odor

There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.
--Tennessee Williams

Reveal

Presidential campaigns are like MRIs for the soul. Whoever you are, the process will reveal you. And the deeper you go in the campaign, the more this is true.
--David Axelrod

Wicked

The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.
--Winston Churchill

Not Predictable

The unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.
--Rebecca Solnit

Less Free

We think we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free. When you make yourself less free, all that happens afterwards is that you are less free. You are not safer.
--Molly Ivins

Disguised

There's a lot of racism in this country disguised as patriotism.
--Colin Kaepernick

Abundance

As long as we believe in scarcity rather than in abundance, coupled with the belief that some people are more deserving than others, the human condition will only deteriorate.
--Christopher Ross

Virtue

Individual rich people can be virtuous. Rich communities never are.
--Alon Levy

Purpose

Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
--Rebecca Solnit

Follow

It's always the same, isn't it? Follow the money. Who benefits? Cui bono.
--Joseph O'Shaughnessy

Not Good

It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS... bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
--Les Moonves

Infinite Scroll

And now, who can keep up? There is a melancholy to the infinite scroll.
--Alexis Madrigal

Exist

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
--Gabriel García Márquez

Help Somebody

Sometimes if I'm sad or scared it helps me to help somebody else feel better. I call it "selfish benevolence."
--Sara Benincasa

Crazy

The pure products of America go crazy.
--William Carlos Williams

Present

The concept of always being reachable makes us present nowhere.
--Peter Arvai

Most Americans

We all know that when a politician or a member of the media uses the phrase, "what most Americans think" it's code for, "I'm pulling this next part out of my ass here, folks. I haven't bothered to check, and I don't suppose you will, either."
--Peter Ramus

Refresh

Immigrants do not dilute "Americanism." In fact, and to the contrary, immigrants refresh and reinforce "Americanism" by being most conscious of why they are here, and their concrete knowledge of what it means not to be here.
--Robert Eller

Ideas

Repressing ideas spreads ideas.
--Neil Gaiman

Failure of the Imagination

Ultimately the destruction of the earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can't buy and corporations can't command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain.
--Rebecca Solnit

Facts

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Aldous Huxley

Fall Apart

This is what the twenty-first century feels like: You sit at your computer trying to figure out how much of what you love is about to fall apart, and how soon and how completely.
--Stephen Marche

Character

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.
--Jean Paul Richter

Bereft

Don't you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? There is something distorted about the psyche. It's a huge waste, and it's a corruption, and a distortion. Its like it's a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is.
--Toni Morrison

Joke

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

I'll Rise

You may tread me in the very dirt.
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
--Maya Angelou

The World Holds

Isn't it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
--Mary Oliver

Species

Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something.
--Frans de Waal

Whole Life

My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.
--Tony Kushner

Conspiracy

The modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
--Richard Hofstadter (1964)

Breeds

Empathy breeds proper judgment. Sympathy breeds sorrow. Contempt breeds arrogance.
--Ray Jasper

Deceive

In the end deceivers deceive only themselves.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Heavier

Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become.
--Patrick Rothfuss

Civilization

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
--Sigmund Freud

Notice

Being a comedian, 80 percent of the job is just you notice shit, which is a trait of schizophrenics too. You notice things other people don't notice.
--Chris Rock

Think

Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be.
--Terry Pratchett

What's Wrong

The whole wide world is wonderin' what's wrong with the United States.
--Roebuck "Pops" Staples (Freedom Highway, 1965)

Eternal

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
--George Orwell

Majority

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
--Harper Lee

A Virtue

Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as much as courage or honesty or compassion.
--Adam Gopnik

Pillory

Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell the truth in time.
--José Martí (Our America, 1891)

Darkness

Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
--Mary Oliver

Incomprehensible

Love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.
--Sufjan Stevens

Salvation

In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America's very soul.
--Malcolm X

Nowhere

It's only by going nowhere--by sitting still or letting my mind relax--that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.
--Pico Iyer

We Go High

Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.
--Michelle Obama

Slipping Away

Is the 21st century a Dark Age, compared to the 20th? Is the culture of modernity and enlightenment slipping away, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world? Is this really an age of neo-primitivism and superstition?
--Michael Lind

Stories

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.
--Garrison Keillor

Cope

Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.
--Alvin Toffler

Labor

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
--Abraham Lincoln

Notion

The notion that evil can be "destroyed" is an ethical version of a fool's errand.
--Steven Paulikas

At Risk

To rebut Black Lives Matter with "All Lives Matter" implies that all lives are equally at risk, and they're not.
--Cheryl Reeve (coach of the Minnesota Lynx, WNBA)

Wholeness

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness--mine, yours, ours--need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.
--Parker Palmer

Despair

There is no love of life without despair of life.
--Albert Camus

Race

Race is the child of racism, not the father.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Take Sides

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
--Elie Wiesel

Borders

Closed borders are one of the world's greatest moral failings, but the opening of borders is the world's greatest economic opportunity.
--Alex Tabarrok (professor of economics, George Mason University)

Seeing

The art of seeing has to be learned.
--Marguerite Duras

Erased

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
--George Orwell

Modern World

This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world.
--Laurie Penny

Pure

The problem with ideological purity is you can never be pure enough.
--Tom Sullivan

America

I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.
―Muhammad Ali

Anger

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.
--William Shakespeare

Qualities

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.
--Samuel Johnson

Tenderness

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.
--Robert Bly

Change

Change is rarely straightforward...Sometimes it's as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
--Rebecca Solnit

A Dare

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
--Muhammad Ali

Walking

We're all just walking each other home.
--Ram Dass

Desire

In human terms, the dynamic nature of life manifests itself as desire. There is always something we want, even if what we want is to break free of the bonds of desire.
--Sean Carroll

Griefs

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
--Marcel Proust

Fictions

It's not just the ridiculous fictions that confirm my atheism, it's the barbaric things that those fictions make humans do.
--Emlyn Addison

Down

Inside of a ring or out, ain't nothing wrong with going down. It's staying down that's wrong.
―Muhammad Ali

Ideas

It is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.
--Neil Gaiman

Creation

Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves.
--Sean Carroll

Thrive

Because, really, people, part of how we are going to thrive in this imperfect moment is through élan, esprit du corps, fierce hope, and generous hearts.
--Rebecca Solnit

Moral

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.
--Susan Sontag

Service

Service to others is the rent which you pay for your room here on earth.
--Muhammad Ali

Song

A song, I'd say, causes the listener to assume a certain stance. Through some intersection of melody/lyrics/arrangement, it causes a shadow-being within us to get a certain expression on its face and fall into a certain posture.
--George Saunders

Up

Choose to lift people up, not to lower them down--because it is a choice, always, and because in doing so you lift yourself up.
--Maria Popova

Liberty

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
--Thurgood Marshall

Clear

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
--W.H. Auden

New Life

It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life.
--Jennifer Moxley

Empowered

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Security

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nobody

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know!
--Emily Dickinson

Question

God is a question, not an answer.
--Kamel Daoud

Same Thing

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.
--Zora Neale Hurston

Luck

Feeling one has had enough luck, more than one deserves, is perhaps the most unfamiliar and uncharted of all emotions.
--Alain de Botton

Gravy

Authenticity is the key. Once you've learned to fake that, the rest is gravy.
--Charles P. Pierce

Lie

People lie for a reason.
Like the law they make up your mind.
--Abigail Washburn

Shines Through

For old people, beauty doesn't come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Progress

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Search

The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.
--Irvin D. Yalom

Superior

Discovery is always superior to invention.
--Stephen Colbert

Getting Older

You can be sure you're getting older when your finger isn't on the pulse of pop culture but you're sure it is.
--Kelly Oxford

False Notion

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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 (1980)

Principles

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
--Albert Camus

Dissolve

Let the GOP split and practically dissolve and come back when it's ready to accept civil rights, voting rights, women's rights, facts and science, and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
--Rodger Lodger

Unjust

The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia when Father Daniel J. Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual star of the Roman Catholic "new left," articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society.
--Daniel Lewis (third paragraph of obituary; New York Times; April 30, 2016)

Uncertain

From the first day I can remember, I was brought up thinking about death. It's a constant companion in our religion. Tomorrow is so uncertain.
--Vin Scully

An Account

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. It's also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
--Rebecca Solnit

You People

I have to rant and rave. I have to keep you people going. Otherwise you'll fall asleep on me.
--Donald Trump (in Connecticut, April 23, 2016)

Progress

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
--Abraham Lincoln (1855)

Great

With great ignorance comes great confidence.
--Shannon Wheeler

Right & Wrong

Have you ever loved anyone more because they were right and you were wrong?
--Jeannette Bessinger

Seek

Dogs seek our giving hands in the same way that flowers seek the sun.
--Dana Jennings

Drugs

Since the desire of man to alter his state of consciousness is as old as human history, and technology continues to provide a breathtaking array of drugs capable of producing everything from oblivion to nirvana, I think it safe to assume that we may never win a "war" against drugs.
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Dead Ideas

Ideological necrophilia is the blind fixation with dead ideas. It turns out this pathology is more common in its political rather than sexual form. Turn on your TV tonight and I bet you will see some politician passionately in love with an idea that has already been tried and failed, or defending beliefs that have been proven false by incontrovertible evidence.
--Moises Naim

Chase

I can't assume that the money chase didn't alter me in some ways...your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.
--Barack Obama

Changed

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
--James Baldwin

Need Each Other

Every spot in the universe is unique. There will always be a piece of it you haven't seen yet and a piece that you have seen but that nobody else has. There is no place to stand if you want to claim universal knowledge. We all need each other in order to overlap our knowledge.
--Dennis Overbye

A Cause

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
--Abraham Lincoln

Bigotry

Bigotry is an illness. It creates a form of dementia and delusional perceptions.
--G. E. Morris

Weird

It's weird. I completely disagree with Angela Merkel's policy. And the more she pursues it, the more I respect her.
--A friend of Daniel Kehlmann (German novelist)

Bipolar

We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.
--Maira Kalman

Uncomfortable

Uncomfortable though it may be, our growth as human beings requires that we examine the ways in which we justify our sometimes inhumane actions and our very human tendencies to accept an authority beyond our own hearts.
--Suzanne Clothier

Money

It's often said that we reveal ourselves every time we discuss and handle money. Are we generous? Parsimonious? Greedy? Do we exaggerate the truth? Are we careless? Do we rationalize our own actions? Look to the personal ledger, and all will be uncovered.
--Helaine Olen

Winning

I think it is very rude of Sanders to keep winning while we are trying to have a conversation about how his campaign is finished.
--Dan Desert

Judge

If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.
--Antonin Gregory Scalia

Pretend

Clearly, unintended consequences ensue when animals with brains pretend that they're angels with bodies.
--Jack Mahoney

Here

Be here now.
--Ram Dass

Look Down

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
--Lyndon B. Johnson

Youth

This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.
--Robert F. Kennedy

One Half

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
--Jay Gould (19th century financier)

Awareness

Eternity is there and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness.
--Albert Camus

In The Name Of

In the end, when you see what can be done in the name of God, it makes you wonder what is left for the devil.
--Anonymous (note left at memorial in Brussels, March 2016)

Engagement

This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It's also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.
--Rebecca Solnit

Who They Are

When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time.
--Maya Angelou

Empathy

Empathy--the ability to feel with another, regardless of whether she or he is a friend, an intimate, an enemy, or an oddity--is a critical component of what makes us human, and humane.
--Meg Corning

Seductive

That's seductive, being paid attention to. That's almost all you have to do to win someone over, is just to see them.
--Dana Spiotta

The Difference

The difference between an amateur and a professional is that an amateur really likes everything they do.
--Bob Mankoff

Owners

It's worth being reminded every so often that in the higher consciousness of the bourgeoisie, nations and all other social arrangements exist only in order to generate payments to owners of financial assets.
--J. W. Mason

Lost

I am free and that is why I am lost.
--Franz Kafka

Cats

There once were two cats in Kilkenny,
Who thought there was one cat too many;
So they quarrelled and fit
They scratched and they bit,
Till, excepting their nails, and the tips of their tails,
Instead of two cats, there wasn't any.
--Folk ditty

Thinker

The thinker does not sit down and say to himself: "Now I am going to think out the relations between so and so." The process is not so much an active as a passive one. In short the thinker dreams over his subject.
--Rosamund E. M. Harding

Unwise Love

We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
--Patrick Rothfuss

Organize

Poor folks ain't got a chance,
unless they organize.
--Florence Reece (Which Side Are You On?)

Liberal

The tolerance and pluralism of liberal societies can often be exploited or assaulted; this does not make tolerance wrong, nor does it show that pluralism is doomed.
--Adam Gopnick

Chaos

I gave in to chaos. The universe is full of it. Black holes eating solar systems. Species wiped out.
--John F. McBride

Ripple

Let's throw this pebble into the water, it may not go far in the beginning, but it will ripple out.
--Thich Nhat Hanh

Will

Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Enables

A good rule of thumb to distinguish between the biological and mythological is that biology enables, culture forbids.
--Yuval Noah Harari

Keeping Them With Us

I subscribe to the old theory that people we love remain with us as long they are fondly remembered, and that keeping them with us this way is a way of expressing our gratitude to them and keeping their spirit alive in the world.
--A. Stanton

Dissent

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
--Justice Robert H. Jackson (West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943)

Belongs

Everything that is important and valuable and good belongs with the little piece of us which is not mechanical.
--Iris Murdoch

If

If we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, our airports and all of the other problems we have, we would have been a lot better off.
--Donald Trump (December 2015)

History

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
--Aldous Huxley

Status Quo

The status quo stays the status quo through fear-mongering and assurances that change happens slowly.
--Josh Salaam

Reason

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.
--Thomas Paine

Notice

What you notice is who you are, maybe.
--Dana Spiotta

Real Love

Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illuminated.
--Henry Miller

Certain

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
--Eric Hoffer

Not Very

Sometimes the law is not very compassionate--you know that.
--Judge Harry Pregerson (U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals)

Virtue

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
--Oscar Wilde

The Past

In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
--William Maxwell

We Wake

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
--John Updike

Complicated

Life is difficult and fucked up and complicated.
--Mike Nichols

Genius

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
--Jonathan Swift

Costumes

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
--Ram Dass

Daredevils

Loving is for the daredevils. It holds so many risks--we lose those we love, and we are forced to feel so deeply.
--Sherman Yellen

Pride

Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
--C.S. Lewis

Qualified

Hillary Clinton is clearly the most qualified candidate to become President of the political system we currently have. Bernie Sanders is clearly the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have.
--Robert Reich

Sensation

Hope, like the delusion of religion, is a wonderful sensation.
--J. A. Barry

Hope

Hope for hope's sake, hope as tautology, hope because hope, hope because "I said so," is the enemy of intelligence.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Technology

Technology can define a culture, and sometimes you forget the thing you're using is technology at all. Until, eventually, inevitably, the technology is all but forgotten.
--Adrienne LaFrance

Money

Since when did money become life?
--Lorraine Hansberry

Gift

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.
--Thich Nhat Hanh

Prosperity

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
--William Jennings Bryan ("Cross of Gold" speech)

The Whole Point

We're supposed to be better than this. That's the whole point of this country.
--Larry Wilmore

Deference

If you wrap what you say in religion, our media will give you nothing but deference.
--Duncan Black

Ultimate Logic

Racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gifts

What punishments of God are not gifts?
--J. R. R. Tolkein

Cosmos

We are a way of the cosmos to know itself.
--Carl Sagan

Stories

We tell stories to continue ourselves.
--Ken Burns

Trying

Life is trying things to see if they work.
--Ray Bradbury

Interruption

The internet is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention.
--Nicholas Carr

Art

We have art so as not to die of the truth.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Something We Can Do

When our fellow citizens are dying and there's something we can do about it, it's morally vacant to say it's their problem.
--Gary Gutting

Funny

Being funny is being awake.
--Robert "Bob" Mankoff

Transition

We are all beginners in times of profound human transition, no matter how much we have seen it before.
--Jennifer L. Hollis