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

Neither Are You

Do not be daunted
by the enormity
of the world's grief.
Do justly, now.
Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free
to abandon it.
--Pirke Avot 2:21 (Mishnah; the first text of the Jewish oral law)

Legs

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
--Frederick Douglass

Concept

I'm a very hardline, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.
--Joss Whedon

Share

Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned--I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.
--Frank Zappa

Modesty

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with "you" in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
--Christopher Hitchens

Tiny Piece

We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
--Alan Lightman

Ambiguity

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
--Pema Chödrön

Ceases

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.
--Justice Robert Jackson

Community

At its best, the primary achievement and consoling power of religion stems from community--a group of people bound by some commonality or another. We don't need religion--we need each other.
--Tundra New England

Decency

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
--Christopher Hitchens

Throw Out

The history and purpose of science has been to supplant itself, throw out old paradigms as they reach a crisis and are supplanted by new ones. This never happens in theology.
--Kayle Clark

Exhale

We don't die inhaling, we exhale, we leave it all behind.
--Sam Jaeger

Fix

It's very hard to see us fixing the climate until we fix our democracy.
--Dr. James E. Hansen

Test

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
--Robert M. Pirsig

Opinions

It's tempting to believe that computers will be neutral and objective, but algorithms are nothing more than opinions embedded in mathematics.
--Cathy O'Neil

Be

Be obscure clearly.
--E.B. White

Stay

I realized that you're in people's lives for a reason. They want you there. It's important to stay.
--V.

Hardest

It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.
--Tony Kushner

Grind

Though the mills of God grind slowly.
Yet they grind exceeding small.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Leave

no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don't know what
i've become.
--Warsan Shire

Children

So many children. You don't walk hundreds of miles with babies unless where you are headed is safer than where you are fleeing.
--Leah McElrath

Thanks

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

--W. S. Merwin

Reach

Cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.
--Maria Popova

Rule of Law

Often I fear it will all come to this, that the rule of law and the rights of men will be destroyed by sectarian mischief and nationalistic recklessness.
--Roger Ebert

Never

Thought I saw an eagle,
But it might have been a vulture.
I never could decide.
--Leonard Cohen

Kindness

If most everything is purely capitalist, a society cannot really invest in gentleness and kindness. The only lesson that people will really learn is that their neighbors and peers, young and old, are commodities.
--Umair Haque

Virtue

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
--Plato

Words

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
--Winston Churchill

Eternity

Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is the dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out.
--Joseph Campbell

Today

Let's lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today.
--Stan Lee (1968)

Profound

Religion is a phase a species goes through when it evolves enough intelligence to ask profound questions, but not enough to answer them.
--Bill Flavel

Finding

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is "finding his place in it," while really it is finding its place in him.
--C.S. Lewis

Lurks

In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.
--Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution; 1939)

Depend

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
--Ernest Hemingway

Drop

No drop of water believes that it is to blame for the flood.
--Jan Kriegel

Voters

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt

Repeat

Very often, when leaders repeat things over and over, they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality.
--Timothy D. Snyder

Reveal

They let themselves weep, for unlike those who think tears indicate weakness they know that they reveal humanity.
--Eliot A. Cohen

Excuse

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Clouds

Carbon dioxide clouds the mind: it directly degrades our ability to think clearly, and we are walling it into our places of education and pumping it into the atmosphere. The crisis of global warming is a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis in our ability to think another way to be. Soon, we shall not be able to think at all.
--James Bridle

Jews

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
--Theodor Adorno

Just Connect

It's not merely that libraries connect us to books. It's that they connect us to one another.
--Chris Bohjalian

Carbon Footprint

The Internet, the primary vector of information about climate change, is increasingly a vector of the problem itself. The world's data centers already have roughly the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry, even as people continue to speak of "the cloud" as though it were a barely corporeal entity.
--Mark O'Connell

Understand

To understand fascism, you need to understand patriarchy.
--Jason Stanley

Invented

It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights.
--Thomas Paine

Enemy

I would suggest that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.
--Senator Barry Goldwater (1962)

Without

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.
--John Adams

Meditation

Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Gives

Sometimes life gives by taking away.
--Carrie Fisher

Always

Race is like weather--we only talk about it when it's extreme but it's always there.
--Touré

Fixed Star

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
--Justice Robert Jackson (West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943)

Science

The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
--William Hazlitt (1829)

Worst

The worse thing to happen to God was religion, and the worse thing to happen to religion was man.
--Morgan James Talley

Wisdom

Today's conventional wisdom on conventional wisdom is that conventional wisdom can no longer be trusted.
--Ben Terris

Shortcut

Gratitude is a shortcut to happiness.
--Roko Belic

Paradox

Each of us must learn to live with paradox, or we cannot live peacefully or happily even a single day of our lives. In fact, we must even learn to love paradox, or we will never be wise, forgiving, or possess the patience of good relationships.
--Richard Rohr

Empathy

Hey, trolls that keep asking me why I don't care about legal citizens as much as I do "illegals"--fuck off. My caring knows no bounds. You are literally talking about obligatory lines in the sand that separate us. We are all humans. Stop trying to gerrymander my empathy.
--Alyssa Milano

Attention

Lying is not hard. All it requires is the nerve to say things that aren't true, while remembering that even the people who know us best are rarely paying attention.
--Sarah Miller

Holy

Some people like nothing better than to do a mean thing for a holy reason.
--Robertson Davies

Moral Law

If an individual takes a lenient view of the moral law, he may well have a high opinion of himself and be conceited, because he judges himself by a false standard.
--Immanuel Kant

The Artist

Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice--all the odious qualities--which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. This is the paradox of artistic achievement.
--Evelyn Waugh

None

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
--William Shakespeare

Forces

There are certain forces within our own national community, composed of men who call themselves American but who would destroy America. They are the forces of dictatorship in our land.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt (November 2, 1940)

I Am

I am a cage, in search of a bird.
--Franz Kafka

Mediocre

There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?
--Senator Roman Hruska (1970, R-Nebraska)

Crushed

The price that we pay
When evil walks the planet
And love is crushed like clay
The master races, the chosen people
The burning temple, the weeping cathedrals
--Paul Simon

Perversion

Trump is a horrible person. Sessions is a horrible person. But, Sessions stands between Trump and Mueller. So, in this opera of demons, Sessions is the one you root for. It's all perversion. Welcome to 2018.
--Charles M. Blow

Hopeful

To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
--Rebecca Solnit

Cannot Accept

If the human race as a whole is to survive, the world must find the way by which men and nations can live together in peace. We cannot accept the doctrine that war must be forever a part of man's destiny.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt (November 2, 1940)

Cure

The cure for loneliness is solitude.
--Marianne Moore

Imagining

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live.
--Aleksandar Hemon

Indifferent

Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols--it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
--William Hazlitt (1823)

The Stories

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
--Rebecca Solnit

Politics

Working with demagogues and autocrats is like working with cancer. You fight it. You cut it out. These aren't political differences, it's deciding if we're going to have politics at all.
--Garry Kasparov

Souls

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
--Thomas Paine (1776)

Audited

Unfortunately, when I haven't seen friends in a while they want to "catch up." "Catching up" is a lot like being audited, as it forces you to account for all the time since you last caught up. Over dinner, friends say things like, "How are you?" The short answer is "Fine." It's short because it ends conversation. Then you have to think of something else to say. The long answer is "Miserable." It's long because they'll want to know why, and then you have to tell them. The medium answer is, "Fine, and you?"
--Iris Smyles

Liberty

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
--William Hazlitt

Catalyst

Listen: Love won't always be reciprocated. Its goal is not reciprocity, but elevation. Personal and atmospheric elevation. It's the decision to not allow darkness internally and to perpetuate light both internally and externally. Love is a catalyst.
--Bernice King