You Don't Know

You cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don't know.
--Matt Haig

Voyeurs

There are moments when it feels as if advanced global technology--smartphones with cameras, social media networks that transcend borders--developed just in time to render us helpless voyeurs to the world's demise.
--Sarah Kendzior

War

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.
--Robert Anton Wilson

Sentences

I'm always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences.
--Peter Orner

Ailment

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
--Plutarch

Our Choice

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
--Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Race

Race is an idea, not a fact.
--Nell Irvin Painter

Half

The case for women is not that they are inherently better or more moral. It is that they are half of humanity and should have the same opportunities--and be judged according to the same standards--as the other half.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Longing

The Welsh have a word for this feeling. The word is "hiraeth." It means a longing for a home you can never return to, a home which may never have existed at all.
--Laurie Penny

Impossible

Agnosticism is an ideology of unknowability, the conviction that is it epistemologically impossible to determine whether or not there is a deity.
--Michele Moses

Interwoven

Racism is so interwoven in the fabric of our country that when we protest racism, people think we are protesting the country.
--AdrianXpression

Swear

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual," of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
--Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

The News

I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news...if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.
--Frank Zappa

Weird

Repeated warnings from my 98-year-old grandma, a Nazi Germany survivor, chill me. She says it all started this way, with one weird unsettling development after another, until they were past the point of no return.
--Jonah Freedman

Clinical

We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.
--Frank Rich (November 2007)

Sunlight

When a tree falls in the forest, it leaves a gap in the canopy. Sunlight that younger trees and underbrush rush to claim. I see these harassers falling, and I wonder about the forest that will grow in the sunlight they're no longer taking up.
--Annalee Flower Horne

Change

Removing shame through deep social interactions and replacing abject isolation with genuine community greatly effects physiological change in a human being's brain.
--Z. Terach

Politics

The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will. If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.
--James Williams

Breath

The anxiety around sex is of the same order as the apprehension we feel in the presence of anything that still has the breath of God in it, that has not been flattened out with conscious intentions and explanations.
--Thomas Moore

Marvelous

How many kinds of love
Might there be in the world,
And how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
To imagine I could know
Such a marvelous business?
--Mary Oliver

Deeply

We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.
--Ram Dass

Open

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
--Muriel Rukeyser

WTF

Of all the great cosmic questions, WTF still strikes me as one of the most pressing, relevant, and ultimately humane.
--Christopher Hitchens

Kids

Republicans want life to begin at conception so they can convince themselves the kids they're attracted to are at least nine months older than they seem.
--Megan Amram

Sorrows

You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Do not hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.
--Matt Haig

Careless

They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Singing

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
--Bertolt Brecht (1939)

Indispensable

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body.
--Tim Kreider

Real

More and more, the ignorant of the land think they, and they alone, are the "real Americans." Those who can think logically and rationally are called elites, atheists and communists.
--Carole A. Dunn (June 2010)

Political

It wasn't a political decision, except insofar as everything a woman does with her body that isn't letting someone else dictate what she ought to do with it is a political decision.
--Hillary Brenhouse

Citizen

You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social.
--Rebecca Solnit

Death

And I hope that you die,
And your death'll come soon.
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon.
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed.
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.
--Bob Dylan (Masters of War)

Back Together

It's like every day you have to get up, put your heart back together, and get going again. What a time.
--Linda Holmes

Fucked

In hindsight, we were all fucked the moment "this is not normal" superseded "this is wrong" as a political argument.
--David Rudin

Magical

Evidently, the prospect that the world at its deepest level rests on a mystery we cannot solve this side of death is so terrifying to some that our wondrous dogs must be regarded as nothing more than meat machines lest their true and astonishing nature should cause us to consider how magical is our very existence.
--Dean Koontz

Lost

The Civil War is still going on. It's still to be fought and regrettably it can still be lost.
--Barbara Fields

Doubt

I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.
--Joan Didion

My Life

Instagram: My life is a party.
Snapchat: My life is a quirky TV show
Facebook: My life turned out great!
Twitter: We're all going to die.
--Mikel Jollett

Over

When it's over, it's over, and we don't know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
--Mary Oliver

Longing

The longing for a frictionless life is a death wish.
--Julie Goldberg

Why

Dear God, who I don't believe in. Why?
--Hayden Black

Myth

Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.
--John Gray

Associate

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
--Edmund Burke

Dignity

When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
--Bayard Rustin

Libraries

Libraries aren't just about books. They are almost the only public space we have left which doesn't like our wallets more than us.
--Matt Haig

Ambiguities

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tell Me

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
--Mary Oliver

See Yourself

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
--Marcus Aurelius

Life

Life is a near-death experience.
--George Carlin

Absolute

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
--Eric Hoffer

Uncomfortable

Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that, but unless it is talked about, constantly, it's not going to get better if people get bored. "Oh, is it that again? They're pulling the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?" Well, because it's uncomfortable, and there has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change. Whether it's the LGBT movement, women's suffrage, race, it doesn't matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people because we're comfortable. We still have no clue of what being born white means.
--Gregg Popovich

Cynical

No matter how cynical I get, it's just never enough to keep up.
--Lily Tomlin

Bomb

There is only one duty for the moment: every other task is a dream and a mockery. Stop the atomic bomb. Stop making the bomb. Abandon the bomb completely. Dismantle every existing bomb.
--Lewis Mumford (1946)

Fit

I still fit into the anxiety I wore in high school.
--Elizabeth Williams

Moron

He was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
--J.D. Salinger

Numbness

Our numbness is our death.
--Lewis Mumford

Dead

If you're not getting older, you're dead.
--Tom Petty

Facts

"Don't politicize this tragedy" is American for "Don't discuss the facts that would help prevent and prepare for future tragedies."
--Toscha

Higher Form

To criticize one's country is to do it a service. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism--a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.
--Senator J. William Fulbright

Together

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together.
--Brené Brown

Screen

Events cast long shadows before.
One such event would be a war.
But how are shadows to be seen
When total darkness fills the screen?
--Bertolt Brecht (1934)

Pigs

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.
--Eugene McCarthy

Soul

You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting.
--Mark Twain

Their Day

They are out there: the brave, the stoical, the imaginative and the decent. Despite everything, they will have their day.
--Roger Cohen

If

If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate, and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill...if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog.
--Jack Kornfield

Written

It could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Extinct

That we die alone, however, seems nothing less than terrifying: Who wouldn't like company in the process of being extinct?
--Daphne Merkin

Loudly

Today I heard my heart screeching like a subway train
loudly enough to remind me it was still human
loudly enough to hurt.
--Audre Lorde

Radical

Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable.
--Junot Díaz

Newcomers

I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers--the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it's precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh.
--Bret Stephens

Everywhere

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

--Warsan Shire

Pointless

It's totally pointless to try and hold Donald Trump accountable for anything. He's not running the country, he's just driving the getaway car.
--Martha Plimpton

Tested

We know ourselves only insofar as we have been tested.
--Wislawa Szymborska

Weather

Weather is the boundary between natural science and human history.
--Stephen Fybish

Infinite

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error.
--Bertolt Brecht

Grace

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
--Wendell Berry (The Peace of Wild Things)

Destiny

There is nothing more mysterious than destiny--of a person, of our species, of our planet, or of the universe itself.
--Brian Swimme

Excess

Don't ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.
--Matt Haig

Scar

The rain
Never falls upwards.
When the wound
Stops hurting,
What hurts is
The scar.
--Bertolt Brecht

Stories

This is kind of how we get through our lives: we tell ourselves stories so that what's happening becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.
--Lidia Yuknavitch

Imagination

The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
--Amitav Ghosh

To War

And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.
--David Wallace-Wells

Citizens

Suddenly I am beginning to realize that Trump may be inadvertently performing a great service for the United States of America. He is forcing citizens of the United States to face our national sins of racism and xenophobia that have been festering since the birth of our country. I have great fear at this time, but I am also filled with hope.
--Ed Pierce

Horror

The casual, unapologetic and ultimately self-destructive violence of white supremacy is the true and enduring horror of American life.
--A. O. Scott

Melanin

The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men's skin, is a white problem.
--Lerone Bennett Jr.

Accept

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this--which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never--the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
--James Baldwin

Imagination

Because white men can't police their imagination, black people are dying.
--Claudia Rankine

It

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.
--Margaret Atwood

Idiots

Don't try to explain yourself to idiots. You're not the fuckface whisperer.
--Rabih Alameddine

Agitation

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
--Frederick Douglass

Insanity

Insanity is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Pitiless

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Eat

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, and other people who just stand around and watch them do it.
--Lillian Hellman

Miss You

I shall miss you so much when I'm dead.
--Harold Pinter

Light

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is supply light and not heat.
--Woodrow Wilson

Goodness

We live in such cynical and amoral times that goodness looks like naiveté to us.
--J. B. Oklahoma

Terrible

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.
--Michel de Montaigne

Might

I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.
--Max Horkheimer

Weight

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.
--Matt Haig

Forever

Forever is composed of Nows.
--Emily Dickinson

Upkeep

Americans have an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one that fetishizes innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery.
--Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel

Weird

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
--Alain de Botton

There

For what are we if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what's there?
--Cory Taylor

Troubled

"Troubled" is modern Washington-speak for "I will preen and make serious faces, and then stick with my party anyway."
--Sam Wang

TK

The most difficult work of empathy may be just this: truly clearing the table of our own stuff, at least for the moment, and not begrudging the space required for another's stuff.
--Suzanne Clothier

Better

Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some.
--Margaret Atwood

Corruption

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
--Adam Smith

Ice

Donald pisses ice water.
--Roy Cohn (1984)

No Matter

Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.
--Albert Einstein

Bond

I lived on this earth for over 73 years and as a trained lawyer, the most persuasive empirical evidence I have found about the existence of God is that someone must have done something to create that special bond between dog and human.
--Ed Rendell

Monsters

Regardless of their different sizes, features, and forms, monsters have one trait in common--they eat humans.
--Paul A. Trout

Psychopathic

If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.
--George Monbiot (November 2011)

Scarce

Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it.
--James Williams

Complexity

We all carry technology in our pockets. And we're somewhat aware that it's being made by people who aren't being paid enough in unsafe conditions. But we make allowances because we've decided that it's necessary. We're sort of lying to ourselves. There's a complexity in how we accept truth.
--Olivia Wilde

Attention

Attention, not mere information, is the key bridge to politics. If you can't block information, deny it attention.
--Zeynep Tufekci

Slavery

The nastiest trick our history books have pulled is making the Civil War itself into the tragedy and not the decades of slavery before it.
--Arthur Chu

Ordinary

Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
--Margaret Atwood

Stars

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.
--Alan Moore

Not Hope

We're feeling what not having hope feels like.
--Michelle Obama

Failed

Let's face it--we are a failed species. We got very "clever" before we got remotely wise. It is a terrible waste of an amazing opportunity and a lovely planet, but the universe will move on.
--Graham Portsmouth

Connect

The only way out of domination is love, and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.
--bell hooks

Beg

If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.
--Anonymous, carved into the wall of cell block 20 at Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

Monkeys

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
--Tom Waits

Here

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
--William Shakespeare

Refusal

Quixotic pessimism is thus marked by a refusal to let the odds of my success determine the value of my fight.
--Mariana Alessandri

Isn't Scary

Heck, I won't even use the self check out at the library. It isn't scary. It's just not the way I am interesting in living.
--Allison Sausalito

Forgive

Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.
--Rebecca Solnit

Mouth

That's the trouble with words, you never know whose mouth they have been in.
--Randeep Ramesh

So Sweet

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
--Emily Dickinson

America

Every serious work of art about America has the same theme: America is a great idea, the reality leaves something to be desired.
--Frank Bidart

Divide

We humans love to compartmentalize things. We love to divide our education system into separate subjects, just as we love to divide our shared planet into nations, and our books into separate genres. But the reality is that things are blurred.
--Matt Haig

Hard

Put your ear down next to your soul and listen hard.
--Anne Sexton

One Can't

One can't love and do nothing.
--Graham Greene

An Evil

There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Sides

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
--Robert M. Pirsig

Ignorance

Ignorantia juris non excusat.
(Ignorance of the law excuses not.)
--Latin maxim

Expensive

Honesty is a very expensive gift. Do not expect it from cheap people.
--Warren Buffett

Exhausted

People I talk to nowadays, black and white alike, feel like they're living through a national psychotic break, and they're exhausted by it.
--Joy Reid

Democracy

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.
--Archibald MacLeish

Short, Precious

We are going to die, as is everyone we adore--I hate this! But the question is, how do we live as women and men in the face of this? Why do we let ourselves be so distracted and obsessed by meaningless bullshit in light of having one short, precious life?
--Anne Lamott

Arsonist

"Conservative" is not the right term for either of them anymore: that word has at least an implication of care and the preservation of legacy. "Arsonist" feels like the more accurate term.
--Zadie Smith

A Place

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
--Marcus Aurelius

Curiosity

Human curiosity is an amazing accelerant.
--Adam Gopnick

Doesn't Care

The God I believe in is not beneficent. He doesn't care.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Hope

The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect.
--Rebecca Solnit

High Beauty

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.
--J.R.R. Tolkien

Not Like

I don't like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.
--Donald Trump (said to a biographer, Michael D'Antonio)

Algorithms

Algorithms are not neutral. Algorithms are not self-generating. Algorithms come from humans and their results are results of human prejudice.
--Malka Older

Talk

When you talk to God it's called prayer, but when God talks to you it's called schizophrenia.
--Earl Bockenfeld

Superior

Peace is not a local thing. That's what makes it superior to war. War stays where war is. Peace belongs elsewhere, as well as at home. That's part of its muscle.
--Colum McCann

Whole

For the awakened individual, however, life begins now, at any and every moment; it begins at the moment when he realizes that he is part of a great whole, and in the realization becomes himself whole.
--Henry Miller

Border

The word "border" refers to the numerous separations or boundaries which reality presents: economic, religious, cultural, legal borders; but it's also true that the body itself is a border. Language is a border. Reality is a border. Imagination is a border.
--Alfonso García Cortéz

Singularity

Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
--John Updike

Golden Rule

Risk pooling is the Golden Rule in action; "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Helping each other allows humans to survive and thrive. Cutthroat competition kills the vulnerable, without thought or remorse, in the degenerate fantasy world of the immature.
--Mark Question

Lying

Lying contains the same hostile elements as a practical joke in that the "victim" ends up looking foolish in his own eyes and laughable in everyone else's.
--Sue Grafton

Promise

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
--Johann von Goethe

Jesus

Donald Trump is Jesus to American followers of Jesus who've totally rejected the teachings of Jesus.
--John Fugelsang

Wealth Addiction

Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country.
--Sam Polk

Meaningful

The greatest obstacle to having a meaningful life is the sense one has too much life left.
--Alain de Botton

Surprise

Surprise. Surprise. Surprise.
--Gomer Pyle

Something

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for.
--David Foster Wallace

Joke

A joke really requires a hidden ground of grievance, for which the joke is only a figure sitting out front.
--Marshall McLuhan

Appeasement

Hazy visions of "healing" and "not becoming the hate we hate" sound dangerously like appeasement.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Friendship

Friendship is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
--Dag Hammarskjold

Troublemakers

We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers. Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn.
--Bayard Rustin

Serenity

Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test is always your own serenity.
--Robert M. Pirsig

Violent

It seems that all my life we have been bombing someone, teaching them a lesson. Every day I understand more deeply how violent we are. Violent to others and violent to ourselves.
--Robert Olmstead

Tribalism

Tribalism is the number one threat that we humans face. Our ability to continue as a species on Earth, as we know it, depends on getting past tribalism.
--Barbara Washington

The Greater

The world indeed is full of peril and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps, the greater.
--J. R. R. Tolkien

Subtle

The truths of nature are subtle, and require deep and careful thought.
--Leonard Mlodinow

Liberty

If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?
--Samuel Johnson

Acceptance

Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.
--Stephen Colbert

Certain

People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe and those who don't believe. They do not really listen to the other side of conversations, and they are too ready to impose their views on others. It is impossible to be certain about God.
--William Irwin

Us

What happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.
--Mamie Till-Mobley

Rapid

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.
--Abraham Lincoln (letter to Joshua Speed; August 24, 1855)

Screens

This is the thing about screens: you can never be sure how clear they are.
--Olivia Laing

Key

We think of the key, each in his prison.
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
--T.S. Eliot

On Time

War sells papers, television advertising and arms. It makes politicians feel important. It provides nationalism with clear enemies to define itself against. Despite all the other failures this administration promises, the US might finally be on time for a world war.
--Frankie Boyle

Disaster

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?
--Senator Joseph McCarthy (June 1951)

Loss

Death is loss without the possibility of being found.
--Kathryn Schulz

Private

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
--Philip K. Dick

Liberty

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
--Learned Hand

Empathy

The truly civilized man is marked by empathy. By his recognition that the thought and understanding of men of other cultures may differ sharply from his own, that what seems natural to him may appear grotesque to others.
--Malcolm Kerr

Fight

If I do not fight bigotry wherever it is, bigotry is thereby strengthened. And to the degree that it is strengthened, it will, thereby, have the power to turn on me.
--Bayard Rustin

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is just another post-yuppie fantasy, more like a balloon than a cloud, one that will burst from over-use, cyber treachery or other natural causes.
--Andrew Marshall

Learn

I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
--Charles Olson

Questioning

Finding our true Jewish identity can begin by questioning our whiteness.
--Rabbi Gil Steinlauf

Crisis

We have inherited a language that is too puny for the crisis we face.
--Rev. Dr. William Barber II

Enchanted

It seems to me that those who loudly proclaim their disenchantment with life have never been really enchanted by it.
--John Buchan

Remembering

We never really "learn" anything in life--what we call learning is actually a kind of remembering. A wisdom that is inherent within each of us can be awakened by intention and full-bodied understanding.
--Frederick Woodruff

Paragons

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
--Tennessee Williams

Race

We may take on racism--we think we know it when we see it--but race and racism aren't the same thing. There are all sorts of barriers when it comes to discussing race.
--Manohla Dargis

Angry

Don't worry about being angry. Worry when being angry becomes impossible. Because then you have been consumed.
--Matt Haig

Infinite

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.
--Leo Tolstoy

True and False

A distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man's imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.
--Gottfried Leibniz

Now

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
--Jack Kerouac

Reality

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.
--Rebecca Solnit

Open

We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated.
--David Wojnarowicz

Stable

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
--James Baldwin

Opinion

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
--Noam Chomsky

News

When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know it is not done by watching news.
--Matt Haig

World War III

As for what worries me about the world, it is war. We already have a World War III in little bits and pieces. Lately there is talk of a possible nuclear war, as though it were a card game.
--Pope Francis (January 2017)

Illusions

Civilized life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
--J.G. Ballard

Accumulate

Freedom is not the freedom to accumulate, but the fact that I have no need to accumulate.
--Max Horkheimer

Loneliness

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political.
--Olivia Laing

Information

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
--Neil Postman

Freedom

I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear.
--Nina Simone

All One

We are all one--and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way.
--Bayard Rustin

Ignorance

Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Concerned

Thanks for this article. I was starting to grow concerned that this might be a day I rolled out of bed and looked at the world through optimistic eyes.
--David Flores

Tired

The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
--Rosa Parks

Memory

If you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it.
--Sally Mann

Time

There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.
--St. Augustine

Story

When we reject a single story, when we realize there is never a single story about any place, we gain a kind of paradise.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Refugees

In the United States, we want to believe we will never become a country of refugees. But the arrival of the refugee hints that that may not be the case. Refugees have been displaced by war or natural disaster or political catastrophes, and they are much more threatening because they are reminders to people that all the comforts that we take for granted can be taken away in just a moment.
--Viet Thanh Nguyen

Karma

You look into Trump's eyes and you see the fear and confusion of a man who has just been told he's got stage-four cervical cancer. He is a super-villain in a world without heroes, a man so obnoxious and unhappy that karma may see him reincarnated as himself.
--Frankie Boyle

Earned

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful.
--W. B. Yeats

Snowflakes

Republicans are the true snowflakes--they're all white, they're cold, and if you put enough of them together they'll shut down public schools.
--Ben Wexler

The Internet

There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet, and there's no easy way to properly calibrate it--no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them.
--Jia Tolentino

Persist

All creatures who persist are whole.
--Laurie Clements Lambeth

Censorship

To be effective, censorship in the digital era requires a reframing of the goals of censorship not as a total denial of access--difficult to achieve completely--but as a denial of attention, focus, and credibility.
--Zeynep Tufekci

Evil

For an act to be evil means that the destruction must be done simply for the hell of it--for the sheer obscene pleasure of the thing, rather than for some functional end.
--Terry Eagleton

How To

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to fear time: watch the news.
--Matt Haig

Action

Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.
--Paul Kalanithi

Irony

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
--Frederick Douglass

Siege

Tyranny does not begin with violence; it begins with the first gesture of collaboration. Its most enduring crime is drawing decent men and women into its siege of the truth.
--Evan Osnos

Reality Inertia

What Kafka knew was that there is no reason to believe that the reality we know and count on as reliable will not suddenly and arbitrarily alter. He knew that the assumption of continuity is based on reality inertia, on the belief that everything will stay as it is simply because it's always been that way.
--Aleksandar Hemon

Together

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
--Lilla Watson

Conquer

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
--Bertrand Russell

What Matters

What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
--Olivia Laing

Uncertainty

When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes--you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.
--Rebecca Solnit

So Many Ways

Nowadays there are so many ways of anesthetizing oneself against daily life, aren't there?
--Pope Francis

Change

Change only happens when ordinary people get involved, get engaged, and come together to demand it.
--President Barack Obama

The Experiment

It's not the nation I love. It's the experiment. The one that started more than two and a half centuries ago. As the flag stands for the nation, the nation stands for the experiment. The experiment was designed to prove something specific: that a people could build a country not on blood ties but on a shared vision, on the values cherished by the highest traditions of the Enlightenment: personal freedom, social equality, religious and ethnic tolerance, and the rule of law. Anyone wanting to help with the experiment was and is welcome to join.
--John Jeremiah Sullivan

Refuse

We must learn and relearn that age's necessary lessons: that meek submission is the most short-sighted of policies; that waiting for the other, more vulnerable group to protest first will only increase the isolation of us all. We must refuse to think that if we play nice and don't make trouble, our group won't be harmed.
--Adam Gopnik

Rough Beast

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
--W. B. Yeats

We The People

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
--Abraham Lincoln

Patriotism

Nihilists will tell you that all patriotism is ignorant nationalism. I prefer to think of it as mature love, good and bad traits accepted.
--Eric Garland

Moral Language

Moral language gives you new metaphors. You can say, I'm against this policy not because it's a conservative policy or a liberal policy, I'm against this policy because it's constitutionally inconsistent, it's morally indefensible, and it's economically insane.
--Rev. William J. Barber, II

Inhuman

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Planning

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
--E.B. White

Not Belonging

Totalitarian domination as a form of government...bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
--Hannah Arendt

Anticipatory

And so we wait, in the state of anxiety and dread that anticipatory mourning brings with it: unsure of what is to come, fearing the worst.
--Meghan O'Rourke

History

Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.
--George Orwell (1944)

Dark

The Dark Ages were not dark because people knew their ignorance. They were dark because people believed they saw the light.
--Sarah Kendzior

Mankind

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.
--Dante Alighieri

How Easy

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in Communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
--Milos Forman

Take Care

Ordinary people aren't good at creating political cultures from scratch, so if we happen to find ourselves inside one that more or less works, we had better take care of it.
--Rob Goodman

Clear-Headed

We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.
--James Baldwin