Privacy

Privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
--Edward Snowden

Peace

True peace is not a balance of opposing forces. It is not a lovely façade which conceals conflicts and divisions. Peace calls for daily commitment.
--Pope Francis

Choice

When you have a choice to make and you don't make it, that in itself is a choice.
--William James

Paradise

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
--Jean Paul Richter

Spiritual

Calvin: Yep, Christmas is just around the corner.
Calvin: And what better way to celebrate a religious holiday than with a month of frenzied consumerism!
Hobbes: I'm surprised other religions haven't picked up on that.
Calvin: Getting loads of loot is a very spiritual experience for me.
--Bill Watterson

Dust and Rainbows

Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,
Help us to see
That without the dust the rainbow
Would not be.
--Langston Hughes

Other

I am an other.
--Arthur Rimbaud

Information

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
--Herbert Simon

Hedge

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
--Tim Kreider

The Oldest Story

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
--Bill Moyers

Belongs

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

Words

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate.
--Doris Lessing

Comparison

Comparison is the death of joy.
--Mark Twain

Self-Respect

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
--Joan Didion

Progress

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
--David Simon

Altered

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
--Nelson Mandela

Choice

There is a statistical theory, degrees of freedom, that proves that every single choice you make narrows your choices (the choices you might make in the future), rendering having it all impossible.
--Delia Ephron

Trust

Sometimes it's those things we least understand that deserve our deepest trust. Isn't that what love and wonder tell us, too?
--Pico Iyer

Repetition

My rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency.
--W.G. Sebald

Attention

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
--Mary Oliver

A Prediction

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
--George Saunders

Dance

When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.
--Paulo Coelho

Stillness

We have forgotten how to be alone in our thoughts. All the best work comes out of that rich stillness of waiting.
--Meg Hutchinson

Generation

The torch has been passed to a new generation.
--John F. Kennedy

Hope To Say

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
--E.B. White

Time Has Come

Comprehensive health insurance is an idea whose time has come in America.
--Richard Nixon (special message to Congress on February 6, 1974)

Superfluous

It's the superfluous for which we live.
--Bertolt Brecht

Now

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now.
--Doris Lessing

Happy

Having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
--Bill Watterson

Nature

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
--E.B. White

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

Market Forces

One of the greatest acts of neoliberal hypnosis over the past 40 years has been convincing almost everyone in mainstream politics, conservatives and liberals alike, that it was both fiscally prudent and morally necessary to subject the entire public sphere to "market forces."
--Andrew O'Hehir

Prestige

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
--Paul Graham

War

War is like love: It always finds a way.
--Bertolt Brecht

The More

The more someone knows about any given subject, the likelier he is to include a lot of boring, hard-to-follow caveats, complicating factors and exceptions in discussing it.
--Tim Kreider

Imperfect

I refuse to accept that the only good response to an imperfect technology is to abandon it.
--Alexis C. Madrigal

Attention

The poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions.
--Daniel Goleman

News

If it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news--car crashes, domestic violence--that you should start worrying.
--Bruce Schneier

Complexity

The complexity of things--the things within things--just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
--Alice Munro

Home

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
--James Baldwin

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

Stop

Remember, the Republicans aren't threatening economic calamity, because they want to rein in spending. They're threatening economic calamity, because they want to stop poor and sick Americans from getting health insurance.
--Matthew O'Brien

Inferiors

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
--Plato

Neutrality

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
--Elie Weisel

What You Love

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.
--Robert Anton Wilson

Injuries

I just don't have the same energy to be as neurotic. You have to put triage on your injuries.
--Junot Díaz

Change

Temporary despair can be a useful response to life: To feel for a time that you are completely defeated and there is no hope can actually be a precursor to meaningful change.
--Cary Tennis

Conscience

The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.
--Pope Francis

Suspend

Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It's when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.
--Delia Ephron

Change

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
--Alan Watts

Bullshit

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit.
--Harry Crews

Love Something

It should be known that it is impossible for human nature not always to love something.
--Origen (3rd century theologian)

Phone

It makes me sad that there are moments in our lives where we're not present because we're looking at a phone.
--Charlene deGuzman

Racism

There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.
--Benjamin Jealous

Suffering

The only thing worse than assuming you could get the better of suffering, I began to think (though I'm no Buddhist), is imagining you could do nothing in its wake.
--Pico Iyer

Ridiculous

The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.
--Guglielmo Marconi (1912)

National

Only with the struggle for national self-determination did it come to be believed that every human being had to belong to a group defined in opposition to others.
--John Gray

Eight

Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments (or "10 Judeo-Christian Moral Injunctions You Need in Your Life Right Now") was surely aware that it could just as well have been eight, or eleven, or seventy-seven commandments.
--Mark O'Connell

Dystopia

Whatever technological dystopia awaits us, it's at once hilarious and mortifying to think that the road there might be paved with asinine status updates, cat pictures and listicles.
--Willy Staley

History

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
--Seamus Heaney

Invaded

Man, I wish Bush was the president. He would have reacted right away. He may have invaded Cyprus or Jordan instead of Syria by mistake, but you know he would have done something at least.
--Abu Bassam (resident of Homs, Syria)

True

A thing is not necessarily true because someone dies for it.
--Oscar Wilde

Meaning

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
--Bill Watterson

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
--Langston Hughes

Position

When White House advisers formulate a position that they believe is correct but which manages to repel everyone, they say that they have "hit the sweet spot."
--David Remnick

Whole

I'd rather be whole than good.
--Carl Jung

Judgmental

You're judgmental, and I mean that in the best possible way. We're told it's good to make judgments about everything else: music, food, politics, clothing. Well, why the hell not judge people? People can be irrational and ignorant and irritating.
--Kim Brooks

Virtues

Adulation of our imaginary virtues, despite all the evidence to the contrary, continues to be one of the oddest things about this country.
--Charles Simic

Why

The day will finally arrive. It may come early in life or it may be the last day of your life, but sooner or later you will ask some very simple questions, to wit--What does my life mean? Why am I the way I am?
--Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg

Loving

Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean--
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
--Langston Hughes

Staging

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.
--Teju Cole

Business

There is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.
--Milton Friedman

Wrong

Big Data allows us to be wrong with infinite precision.
--Nicola Hughes

Knowing

I was doing, I believed, what we all want to do, which is find a way to capture things before they dissolve, to not lose our lives to the relentless pace that keeps us from knowing who we are and what we want.
--Michael Paterniti

Small Change

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We, who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Maturity

A man's maturity consists of regaining the seriousness one had when a child at play.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Suspicions

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
--Robert Anton Wilson

Entropy

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.
--Philip K. Dick