Ghosts

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

History

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

Cooperation

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

Discover

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

Commitments

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

Moment

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

Capitalism

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

Border

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

The Soft Animal

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.
--Mary Oliver

Living Thing

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

Told You

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

Hoax

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

Wholeness

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

Really

Nothing changes really about love.
--Alice Munro

Moral

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

Multiple Causes

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

Mutters

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

In This World

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

Humanity

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

The People

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

Concealed

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

Soul

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

Stupid Kids

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