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