Trying

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
--B.F. Skinner

Pardon

Love truth, but pardon error.
--Voltaire

Pure

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
--Louise Bogan [04.12.99]

Plunders

Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.
--Terry Eagleton [11.16.99]

Enclose

"Home" is any four walls that enclose the right person.
--Helen Rowland [12.24.02]

Important

Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
--James Baldwin

Change

I think people don't change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.
--Fred Rogers

Safe

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.
--Billy (age 4) [02.15.02]

Real

Everything you can imagine is real.
--Pablo Picasso [08.27.09]

Create

I think that how we were first loved--or not--has a great deal to do with what we create and how.
--Fred Rogers

Love

The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity--love. And the story of a love is not important--what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
--Helen Hayes [09.26.01]

Teach

It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.
--Patrick Rothfuss

Approaches

It is a very common phenomenon to feel the greatest despair just as a long-desired goal approaches.
--Graham Firchlis [07.22.10]

Known

Desire is the wish to be completely known to another.
--Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [12.10.98]

Reality

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
--Henri Louis Bergson [09.19.06]

Create

What I cannot create, I do not understand.
--Richard Feynman

Plain

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
--Anthony Doerr

Bearable

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
--Carl Sagan [06.22.06]

Enough

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
--Mary Oliver (Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness) [11.13.13]

Economics

Economics is at heart a narrative art, a frame across which data points are woven into stories about how the world should work.
--Nathan Heller

Path

I cannot cause light, the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
--Annie Dillard [10.01.99]

Gift

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.
--Thich Nhat Hanh [01.22.16]

Magical

Political dedication by its nature requires a degree of magical thinking: a privileging of optimism over lived experience.
--Rebecca Traister

Belongs

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
--Walt Whitman [12.13.13]

Room

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
--Mary Oliver

Days

Where can we live but days?
--Philip Larkin [05.09.07]

Uncomfortable

I was so sick of lying about how I felt to make other people feel less uncomfortable around me.
--Gary Gulman

Fire

Time is the fire in which we burn.
--Delmore Schwartz

Totally

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
--Marshall McLuhan (1965)

Rational

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.
--Amy Wallace [10.26.09]

Strangest

Capitalism is the strangest thing in the universe: a thing which turns other things into nothing. All the forests and oceans and rivers and mountains--where are they now? They "made money." They were made into money. They were literally turned into capital. They are sitting in the bank accounts of the ultra-rich, doing nothing.
--Umar Haque

Enchained

All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Madness

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
--Isaac Newton [01.08.01]

Yourself

You can be your best self only when you're being yourself.
--Charlie Morton

We Know

Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.
--St. Augustine

Joy

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
--Bertrand Russell [11.29.12]

Who

Who am I, and what would he be doing?
--Angus Johnston

Radical

The most radical climate policy--the one that will most disrupt our lives--is the status quo.
--Jake M. Grumbach

Humility

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.
--St. Augustine [02.11.99]

Fraud

Race is a fraud. All modern people are the conglomeration of so many ethnic
mixtures that no pure race remains.
--Albert Einstein (October 1929)

Want

Sometimes you have to make the thing you want to be part of.
--Steven Edney

Hard

Creating anything is hard. It's a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don't know anything.
--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Power

Never underestimate the power of a second chance.
--Tanya McKean

Keep Trying

C'mon, you know how this works. You fail and then you try something else. And you fail again, and again, and you fail a thousand times, and you keep trying because maybe the thousand-and-first idea might work.
--Michael Schur

Meaningful

We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor.
--bell hooks [12.11.15]

You

I like you; your eyes are full of language.
--Anne Sexton

Certainty

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
--Voltaire [04.04.01]

Meaning

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have meaning.
--Vaclav Havel

Radical

True love is radical because it requires us to see ourselves in all people. Otherwise, it isn't love. Love is revolutionary because it has us treat all people as we would ourselves--not because we are charitable, but because we are one. That is love's radical conclusion.
--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Option

Relapse into barbarism is always an option.
--Theodor Adorno

Hates

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
--James Baldwin

Soul

The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity.
--Jose Marti [12.02.05]

Agitation

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

Embrace

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.
--Rebecca Solnit [01.25.17]

No, I'd never been to this country
before. No, I didn't know where the roads
would lead me. No, I didn't intend to
turn back.
--Mary Oliver

Truth

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
--Adrienne Rich

Skin

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
--Samuel Ullman [04.26.02]

Small Acts

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world.
--Howard Zinn

We

Ultimately we must be saved by hope, faith, love, and forgiveness.
--Reinhold Neibuhr [10.19.00]

Obsessed

Every human should be at least partially obsessed with climate change.
--David Hallerman

Heart

Changing one disastrous energy source for a slightly less disastrous one is not progress. Exporting our emissions overseas is not reducing our emission. Creative accounting will not help us. In fact, it's the very heart of the problem.
--Greta Thunberg

Urgency

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that, because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe.
--Greta Thunberg

Crisis

This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses, or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.
--Greta Thunberg

Physics

The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy now is physics. And we can not make "deals" with physics.
--Greta Thunberg

Empathy

All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.
--Samantha Power

Stuck

The soul wants to be attached, involved, and even stuck, because it is through such intimacy that it is nourished, initiated, and deepened.
--Thomas Moore [10.13.03]

Afraid

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
--Bertolt Brecht

Language

Word-work is sublime...because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
--Toni Morrison [05.03.12]

Attend

My experience is what I agree to attend to.
--William James [11.12.99]

Stimulate

A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students' creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.
--Herbie Hancock

Rules

My mother asked me, "Why do you always take pictures of poor people?" It wasn't true, but my sympathies were with people who struggled. There was also my mistrust of people who made the rules.
--Robert Frank

Reply

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
--Leonard Bernstein [12.24.03]

Change

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change--and we all instinctively avoid it.
--E.B. White [10.10.05]

Entire

Do not feel lonely. The entire universe is inside you.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Voice

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
--W. H. Auden

Assaults

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
--John Maynard Keynes [11.18.08]

Progress

Ethical progress is unlikely when we do only what we are told.
--George Monbiot

Use

What we use is not ours simply because we use it.
--Erich Fromm

Rewriting

I would have liked to spend my life writing and rewriting the same story, in the hope of understanding it at least, and of making it understood by others.
--Ignacio Silone

Cope

We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces.
--Günter Grass [09.21.06]

Ridiculous

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
--Thornton Wilder [12.01.04]

Provisional

We are a loose collection glued briefly into a provisional thing called self, and all such things are bound to dissolution. How could this be otherwise?
--Sallie Tisdale

Box

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
--Mary Oliver

Change

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
--Margaret Mead

World War III

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
--Marshall McLuhan (1970)

You Can

You write in order to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.
--James Baldwin

Seen

A problem not seen is a problem not fixed.
--Elizabeth Warren

Sudden

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.
--Madeleine L'Engle [10.26.99]

Try

You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
--George Orwell

Why

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?
--Christopher Hitchens

Yes

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future world depends.
--Wallace Stevens [02.01.07]

Note

Epstein's suicide note will be released as soon as Barr finishes writing it.
--Julie Ford

Tomato

Every day we have to wake up, confront the most upsetting shit we've ever seen, and then walk around obeying laws and saying "it's tomato season."
--Sarah Lazarus

Trap

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.
--Robinson Jeffers

Curse

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
--Hannah Arendt [11.01.10]

One Step

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.
--Toni Morrison (March 1995)

Look

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.
--Dave Eggers [04.02.07]

Failed

To accept the climate emergency is to admit that we have all failed, in a major way. And this is not an easy thing to do.
--Greta Thunberg

Serious

It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.
--Mary Oliver

Question

The only real question to be asked of another is "What are you going through?"
--Simone Weil [05.14.99]

Love

If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.
--James Baldwin

Beacon

We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
--Margaret Atwood

Wicked

How long, Lord, will the wicked,
how long will the wicked be jubilant?
They pour out arrogant words;
all the evildoers are full of boasting.
They crush your people, Lord;
they oppress your inheritance.
They slay the widow and the foreigner;
they murder the fatherless.
They say, "The Lord does not see..."
--Psalm 94, excerpt

Limitations

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
--Chris Hedges

Solemn

Politics isn't entertainment, it is not a performance to be critiqued. Reporting on national politics is a public trust of solemn importance that affects hundreds of millions of people.
--Maria Bustillos (Columbia Journalism Review; July 24, 2019)

Evil

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.
--Simone Weil

Ordinary

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.
--Pema Chödrön

America

I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
--Langston Hughes

Slowly

Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell.
--Carrie Fisher

Practices

A religion is defined not just by its holy texts but also by how believers interpret those texts--that is, by its practices. The ways in which believers act out their faith define that faith.
--Kenan Malik (January 2015)

Care

One must care about a world one will not see.
--Bertrand Russell

Fearful

A common phrase on nineteenth-century tombstones went: "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch."
--Sallie Tisdale

Erase

Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to disassociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them.
--Rebecca Solnit (June 2013)

The Secret

Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.
--Chris Hedges

Potent

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
--Chris Hedges

Change

Each of us may be nothing more than a moving wave of change, but we are waves able to know that.
--Sallie Tisdale

Fight

I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
--Chris Hedges (May 2015)

American

I think that I'm particularly and uniquely and very deeply American. If we want to talk about the ideals that we stand for, all the songs and the anthem and sort of what we were founded on, I think I'm extremely American.
--Megan Rapinoe (July 3, 2019)

Paradox

The paradox of education is precisely this--that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
--James Baldwin

The Object...

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
--George Orwell

Responsible

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Nowhere

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
--George Orwell

FORWARD

Is this the end of a story that has been told? Is the book of democracy now to be closed and placed away upon the dusty shelves of time? My answer is this: All we have known of the glories of democracy--its freedom, its efficiency as a mode of living, its ability to meet the aspirations of the common man--all these are merely an introduction to the greater story of a more glorious future. We Americans of today--all of us--we are characters in this living book of democracy. But we are also its author. It falls upon us now to say whether the chapters that are to come will tell a story of retreat or a story of continued advance. I believe that the American people will say: "Forward!"
--Franklin D. Roosevelt (November 2, 1940; final campaign speech, Cleveland)

Knows

Don't worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
--Joy Harjo

Engage

Applying the term "concentration camp" to the indefinite detention without trial of thousands of civilians in inhumane conditions--under armed guard and without adequate provisions or medical care--is not just appropriate, it's necessary. Invoking the words do not demean the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, the lessons of the Holocaust will be lost if we refuse to engage with them.
--Anna Lind-Guzik

No Limit

Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings.
--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Anything

Ask not for whom the little immigrant children suffer. They suffer for you. They are your harbingers, they are thousands of Cassandras now whispering in all our ears: "A government that can do this to us, can do anything to you, too."
--@LTrotsky21

Obligation

The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it--at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
--James Baldwin

Untrue

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Power

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
--George Orwell

Revise

Keep in mind that to revise means, literally, "to look at again," to re-envision. To revise a life means to see it anew, to see possibilities in it that you could not see before. Try to bring a fresh set of eyes to your life today. Keep moving.
--Maggie Smith

Fact

We may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Singing

People inspire each other in ways no one will ever understand. No one is coming up with any of this shit from scratch. We are standing on the backs of our ancestors and singing to and for each other.
--Anaïs Mitchell

Fantasy World

It's so much deeper than playing basketball for money and all that goes into the machine. We're really in a fantasy world and it takes away from you having feelings or expressing yourself as far as being a human being.
--Andre Iguodala

Team Sport

My folks raised me with the understanding that life is a team sport--and so is walking out of hell.
--Rachel Chavkin

Prisms

Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and that's essentially how we know who we are, by retelling and reframing these stories. Part of why these stories survive is they're like prisms where different things show up in them depending on the light of the current day.
--Rachel Chavkin

Trick

A rhetorical trick is being played on us when people use the term "abortion debate." Our right to bodily autonomy is not up for debate. A religious minority's move to control the bodies of half the country's citizens isn't a debate. It's an outrageous human rights violation.
--Lauren Groff

Justice

Perhaps, he thought, it'd be better to live in a story where the righteous were rewarded and the sinners were punished, even if the criteria for righteousness and sinfulness eluded him, than to live in a reality where there was no justice at all.
--Ted Chiang

Support and Defend

I took the congressional oath of office for a third time this week, and the most important of the 71 words in that oath was my vow to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." These words are especially critical and poignant this year as we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on our country.
--Gabrielle Giffords

Trick

A rhetorical trick is being played on us when people use the term "abortion debate." Our right to bodily autonomy is not up for debate. A religious minority's move to control the bodies of half the country's citizens isn't a debate. It's an outrageous human rights violation.
--Lauren Groff

Worthless

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make other people happy, because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they don't want anyone else to feel like that.
--Robin Williams

No Matter

Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Nothing

We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
--Margaret Atwood

Needs

Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.
--Bertolt Brecht

Sacred

Words are sacred. I believe they are more sacred to children than they are to most of us.
--N. Scott Momaday

Givings

You know, we all make deals in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It's a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away.
--David Milch

Jew

As a Jew in America, I was raised to believe two rather contradictory things: The United States is safe for us, and our world can descend into bigoted violence at any moment.
--Mark Joseph Stern

Words

Don't tell me words don't matter.
--Barack Obama

Horse Race

Rank them. Sort them. Do whatever your cyberalgorithms tell you will get the most eyeballs. The political reporting is so fixated on who's winning or falling behind that the horse race eclipses the actual economic and social conditions of the country.
--Robert Hennelly

Once

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
--Charles Lamb

Monitored

Sometimes I am surprised by how little I mind having my behavior monitored.
--Susan Orlean

Fading Away

To age is to feel as if pieces of you are falling or fading away, so that you somehow take up less space in the world. So that you're harder to see.
--Frank Bruni

Commit

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating--in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.
--Anne Morriss

Rules

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
--Malcolm X

Enough

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
--Ted Chiang

Cherish

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: "Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen." I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
--E. B. White

Endure

To be breakable is not the same thing as to be perishable. Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.
--G. K. Chesterton

Honor

Let's take a moment to honor the sacrifice of our brave school children who lay down their lives to protect our right to bear arms.
--Anonymous

Extensions

Algorithms and machine intelligence are only extensions of the men and women who create them.
--Louis Menand

What It Is

It's 2019. Can we all now please stop saying "climate change" and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?
--Greta Thunberg

Wall

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
--Frank Zappa

Think

We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.
--Rod Serling

Disease

The appearance of anti-Semitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.
--Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (September 27 2016)

Marriage

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
--Pearl Buck

Want

You should always give thought to what you want and why you want it.
--Stacey Abrams

Substitute

Worrying about someone is a poor substitute for loving them.
--Talia Lavin

Essence

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Disaster

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster.
--Winston Churchill

Justice

The U.S. cultural concept of "Justice" is too often crippled by confining it to an emotional craving for retribution (revenge). The cure awaits the realization that the essence of Justice is fulfilled only with the healing of a wounded spirit. While that approach will not succeed in all cases, the righteous are not excused from the effort. These are ancient truths.
--Kirk Bready

Divine

All other mediums use technology to achieve our kind of magic. In the theatre, all we have is the most divine instrument ever created and that is the human form.
--André De Shields

Beyond

Every age has had its hopes, hopes that look to something beyond the life of the age itself, hopes that try to pierce into the future.
--William Morris (1885)

Supplant

Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.
--Sally Mann

Books

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature is dumb, science is crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
--Barbara Tuchman

Nervous

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.
--Shana Alexander

Wants

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Next

Whatever is next could be really enlightened, and it could be really ugly.
--Pete Buttigieg

Remember

Memory is not a quantifiable value in human life. Simply because our memories are not a perfect reflection of truth. What and how we remember is not directly based on facts. We remember what is good for us.
--Karl Ove Knausgård

How Else

Despair is, in a way, an appropriate response to the world; how else to face the corrosive power of time, how else to accommodate the brevity and frailty of the self?
--Mark Doty

More

Being with people I don't know and feel I have to entertain--I find that exhausting. But being with people I love? I have more energy after.
--Ina Garten

Shape

Stories are our way of coping, of creating shape out of mess.
--Sarah Polley

Simple

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
--Charles Mingus

Injecting

The world won't leave things be. It's always injecting endings into beginnings.
--David Mitchell

Hate

I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Culture

Culture is everything we don't have to do.
--Brian Eno

Interrogate

That's what makes the left the left. One is constantly needing to interrogate one's own assumptions.
--Tony Kushner

Stories

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind.
--Rebecca Solnit

Really

I could tell you
If I wanted to,
What makes me
What I am.

But I don't
Really want to -
And you don't
Give a damn.
--Langston Hughes

Reason

The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades.
--Max Horkheimer (1941)

Friendship

If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
--Michel de Montaigne

Culture

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.
--Umberto Eco

Forgiven

To deny her forgiveness was to act arrogantly, as if I had never needed to be forgiven, as if I would not need to be forgiven countless times in the future.
--Suzanne Clothier

Learn

I've been thinking about bad decisions and how good decisions grow out of them. Climbing the radio tower was dumb. The borrowed motorcycle, the drummer's sister, the mysterious powder, the third trip to the buffet. All terrible ideas. My question is, how do cautious people ever learn anything?
--Dave Maleckar

To Burn

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
--Walter Pater

Accept

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those things among others.
--George Orwell (1940)

Fabricate

The most significant quality of totalitarian thinkers is an extreme contempt for facts, for, in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.
--Hannah Arendt

Screens

If you'd rather browse your phone than talk with the people you are dining with, you are dining with the wrong people. Must be awful to never be where you want to be, always longingly "peeking" at the "window."
--BluBlu Musica

Effort

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all.
--Quentin Crisp

Trust

Trust is the oil in the engine of capitalism; without it the engine seizes up. Confidence is like the gasoline; without it the machine won't move.
--Richard L. Peterson

Creepy

Most people would consider an animatronic sex doll creepy. But isn't that pretty much what Facebook is? It's a mechanism for replacing real human interaction with low effort, low risk interaction at a distance.
--Zarko Slate

Kind

Being kind to others is a way of being good to yourself.
--Rabbi Harold Kushner

Contours

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
--Ernest Hemingway

Reason

Reason has always existed, but not always in reasonable form.
--Karl Marx

Fluid

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
--Mark Twain

Tribal vs Ideological

Some of us are purely tribal--our loyalty is to our family, posse, gang, political party, identity group, no matter what. That's been part of the gangster ethos of the Trump Administration. Others among us are ideological: our primary loyalty is to values and truth, and we will repudiate or tell harsh truths about even people we love if they violate those values. The tribalists will repudiate values to stay with the gang. It's a way to understand how good Republicans are at cohesiveness and how bad Democrats can be, and why that is sometimes a good thing.
--Rebecca Solnit

Price

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
--Eldridge Cleaver

Tell You

Listen. If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
--Neil Gaiman

Aging

The history of aging appears to follow this rule: the fewer old people there are, the more esteemed they will be.
--Jill Lepore

Tiny

We're looking at reality as it really is, we're being brave enough and grown-up enough to know how tiny we truly are.
--Ann Druyan

Banking

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
--Henry Ford (notable anti-Semite)

Curiosity

It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer.
--Richard P. Feynman

Dinner

Earth is Forgiveness School. You might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.
--Anne Lamott

Matter

Don't always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It's the warm bits that matter.
--Matt Haig

Change

The concentration of wealth parallels the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: it is economic climate change with consequences equally as dire as global warming on all life forms.
--Yuri Asian

Fear

Adults keep saying: "We owe it to the young people to give them hope." But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.
--Greta Thunberg (speech at Davos; January 2019)

Change

Anyone willing to change will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change.
--Amos Oz

Masquerading

This is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.
--Sarah Kendzior

Hypocrites

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others...when you pray, go into your room and close the door.
--Jesus Christ (Matthew 6)

Time

In you, my mind, I measure time.
--St. Augustine

Events

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Charm

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
--Aldous Huxley

History

I have always believed the past contains the truth, that history explains.
--Jill Lepore

Cruel

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.
--Renata Adler

Safe

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
--Adlai Stevenson

Culture

Culture is everything we don't have to do.
--Brian Eno

Belief

What is it the Testament teaches us?--to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
--Thomas Paine

Illicit

Since most people are sleeping when I'm awake--their circadian rhythms in happy synchrony with the diurnal clock--my insomnia is troubled by a sense of trespass, even contamination: the illicit importing of day into night.
--Marina Benjamin

Able

The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Home

In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home!
--George Carlin

Revision

Writers, for the most part, find themselves not in writing but in revision.
--Hilton Als

Marx

I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician.
--David Simon

The Present

For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past.
--Karl Mannheim

Last Chance

Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
--Mary Oliver (October)

Examined

Emerson, I am trying to live,
as you said we must, the examined life.
But there are days I wish
there was less in my head to examine,
not to speak of the busy heart.
--Mary Oliver (Percy, Waiting for Ricky)

Reaches Out

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
--Mary Oliver (The Sun)

For Days

Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
like the wind over the water--
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.
--Mary Oliver (Maybe)

Miracle

But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again--a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment.
--Mary Oliver (Skunk Cabbage)

Exist

If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

School

You're like a little wild thing
that was never sent to school.
Sit, I say, and you jump up.
Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand
to the nearest dead fish
with which you perfume your sweet neck.
It is summer.
How many summers does a little dog have?

Run, run Percy.
This is our school.
--Mary Oliver

Crime

One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
--James Baldwin

Moments

As the world is ending, I'm always glad to be entertained for a few moments. The best way to do that is with music.
--Kurt Vonnegut (March 2006)

Freedom

To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something--and it is only such love that can know freedom.
--Jiddu Krishnamurti

Work

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing, the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.
--Bruce Grocott

Compromise

This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.
--James Fallows (September 2013)

Strategy

The strategy of truth is not, because it deals in truth, devoid of strategy. It is not enough, in this war of hoaxes and delusions and perpetuated lies, to be merely honest. It is necessary also to be wise.
--Archibald MacLeish

Hear

You can't steal a gift. Charlie Parker gave the world his music, and if you can hear it, you can have it.
--Dizzy Gillespie

Resaturate

What do you do with an insight like "love is everything"? I wondered aloud. "Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude?"

No, I decided: "A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight."
--Michael Pollan

Criminals

The American Constitution was not written to protect criminals. It was written to protect the government from becoming criminals.
--Lenny Bruce