Quotes

Categories are just for keeping order and are semi-continuously updated. The relation between themes and quotes is many:many, so this is a very imperfect representation.

Adventure

At a time when, all too often, our daily lives are unwittingly filled with activities that don’t stay long in the mind, small overnight adventures make memories. There’s no cheaper and more accessible way to reinstill a sense of wonder for local places that you’ve foolishly convinced yourself are wonder-less.
– A McNuff, “Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups”

things going tits-up is the mark of a great adventure. Tell me a story about ‘the time it all went right’ and I’ll get bored halfway through. So why we always expect the greatest adventure of all – life – to go to plan is beyond me.
– A McNuff, “Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups”

Adventure is more about mindset than where in the world you are, after all. You can have the most magical adventure in the space of an afternoon, an evening, or even overnight in the middle of the week – experiences that the British adventurer Alastair Humphreys has labelled ‘microadventures’.
– A McNuff, “Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups”

Consumerism

When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went: there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over; like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And when finally you got hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald’s hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth, back to before you were born, and in addition bad people - liars - said it was made out of turkey gizzards anyhow. They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered it if was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairly tale “How the Sea became Salt.”. SOmeday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living room. That way we won’t even have to go outside.
– P K Dick, “A Scanner Darkly “

Creativity & Wonder

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

All the things that Napoleon stood for seemed so trivial at that moment, his hero seemed so petty in his squalid vanity and triumphalism, compared with that lofty, righteous and kindly sky …
– L Tolstoy, “War and Peace” (Andrei under the lofty sky)

Diversity

We know from our own society that humans are diverse: people come in all shapes and sizes, individuals can have all sorts of traits and interests and gender manifests in multiple ways. Yet we look to historical and archaeological records to do something magical: we expect them to show worlds in which every single person followed strictly defined social patterns and never deviated from them.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

Once people were seen as socially distinct, they could be imagined as essentially different.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

Environment

for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience” isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you - your capacity to see it, feel it.
– K Harris, “Lands of lost borders”

“I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn’t deserve a new world; we’d just wreck it all over again.
– K Harris, “Lands of lost borders”

Freedom & lack thereof

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—’Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

All good things are wild and free.
– H J Thoreau, “Walking” (lecture)

It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.
– Jane Austen, “Sense and Sensibility”

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
– G Orwell, “1984”

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
– G Orwell, “1984”

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
– G Orwell, “1984”

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The heresy of heresies was common sense.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
– G Orwell, “1984”

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.
– G Orwell, “1984”

When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
– G Orwell, “1984”

the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
– G Orwell, “1984”

In Newspeak there is no word for ’Science’.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.
– G Orwell, “1984”

In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ’war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This — although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned.
– G Orwell, “1984”

as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels.
– G Orwell, “1984”

in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
– G Orwell, “1984”

the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ’abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
– G Orwell, “1984”

the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called ’class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able — and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years — to arrest the course of history.
– G Orwell, “1984”

it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
– G Orwell, “1984”

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end.
– G Orwell, “1984”

can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.
– G Orwell, “1984”

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.
– G Orwell, “1984”

To die hating them, that was freedom.
– G Orwell, “1984”

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.
– G Orwell, “1984”

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
– G Orwell, “1984”

Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.
– G Orwell, “1984”

in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available.
– G Orwell, “1984”

The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal.
– G Orwell, “1984”

A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ’politically equal’, or that free had once meant ’intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook.
– G Orwell, “1984”

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them.
– G Orwell, “1984”

It is a peculiar hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively off-load any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer.
– P R Keefe, “Empire of Pain”

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
– A Huxley, 1946 preface to “Brave New World”

God

The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I actually think God is more of a brilliant marketing ploy.
– Abe Weissman in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God, of a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.
– O Butler, “Parable of the Sower”

Good, evil & futility

To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Adam could do no dishonesty. He didn’t want anything. You had to crave something to be dishonest.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Suppose it were true - Adam, the most rigidly honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. Lee laughed to himself - now this second will, and Aron, whose purity was a little on the self-indulgent side, living all his life on the profits from a whorehouse. Was this some kind of joke or did things balance so that if one went too far in one direction an automatic slide moved on the scale and the balance was re-established?
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

The Battle of Kyiv taught me one thing - in the darkest moments, always act according to your highest moral principles. No matter how hard and scary that might be. It will be hard, but at the end of the day, it will always be the only right decision. The seemingly easiest way is always wrong. Deals with the devil made out of weakness and a desire to sweep trouble under the rug never end well.
– I Ponomarenko, “I will show you how it was”

Looking Napoleon straight in the eye, Prince Andrey mused on the insignificance of greatness, on the insignificance of human life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and most of all the insignificance of death, which no living person could make sense of or explain.
– L Tolstoy, “War and Peace”

Human beings are good at creating hells for themselves even out of richness.
– O Butler, “Parable of the Sower”

Human relations

All great and precious things are lonely.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

in all the time we spend making plans, we never stop to question whether things going as expected is actually what matters most.
– A McNuff, “Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups”

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Isn’t it strange that today we have forgotten this? We remember World War I as quick victory, with flags and bands, marching and horseplay and returning soldiers, fights in the barrooms with the goddam Limeys who thought they had won the war. How quickly we forgot that in that winter Ludendorff could not be beaten and that many people were preparing in their minds and spirits for a lost war.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I hope I’m not so small-souled as to take satisfaction in being missed.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
– F S Fitzgerald, “The great Gatsby”

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues”
– F S Fitzgerald, “The great Gatsby”

“and I do not know, Mrs Elton, whether the uncertainty of our meetings, the sort of constant expectation there will be of his coming today or tomorrow, and at any hour, may not be more friendly to happiness than having him actually in the house. It think it is so. I think it is the state of mind which gives most spirit and delight.”
– J Austen, “Emma”

Over millennia, we’ve been pushed gradually into believing that there are just a few ways in which we can live.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.
– H Melville, “Moby Dick”

For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
– H Melville, “Moby Dick”

Has there ever been another time, in the full sweep of human history, when so many people had so much and yet felt so deprived and anxious?
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.
– M Atwood, “The Testaments”

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I have often thought that perhaps formal good manners may be a cushion against heartbreak.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Maybe I wanted to hand down the nonsense that passes for wisdom in a parent, to force it on my own helpless children.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I guess we were like a tough but inexperienced little boy who gets punched in the nose in the first flurry and it hurts and we wished it was over.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

It’s only when things fall apart that you begin to see the true measure of a friend.
– A McNuff, “Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups”

The effect of Lady Ann’s departure upon her former husband did not interest society – which indeed is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.
– J Le Carré, “Call for the Dead”

Wisdom has no need of violence.
– L Tolstoy, “War and Peace”

Intelligence & knowledge

Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

A man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong.
– Attributed to M Faraday, from a speech he gave in 1819.

The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self.
– A Huxley

There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It’s not an uncommon disease. But it’s nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.” “I’d think there are degrees of greatness,” Adam said. “I don’t think so,” said Samuel. “That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other—cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

One of the most painful parts about teaching mathematics is seeing students damaged by the cult of the genius. The genius cult tells students it’s not worth doing mathematics unless you’re the best at mathematics, because those special few are the only ones whose contributions matter. We don’t treat any other subject that way!
– J Ellenberg, “How not to be wrong”

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
– O Butler, “Parable of the Sower”

Power & history of

A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight. Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Quando noi valutiamo oggi il militarismo nazifascista, lo facciamo dopo la sua sconfitta, con la sicurezza di chi ha combattuto e vinto. È difficile ricostruire lo stato d’animo di allora, di fronte al nazifascismo permanentemente vittorioso e trionfante, …
– J Lussu, “Portrait”

The scheming of Britain, France and the United States over oil, politics and power helped create and fuel the problems of the Middle East for decades afterwards. Nations and peoples were used as assets or weapons. Lines were drawn in the sand, blown away and drawn again. All of this was done with precious little foresight about where it might lead
– A von Tunzelmann, “Blood and Sand” [talking about the Suez crisis of 1956]

The United States and the Soviet Union were two nations themselves formed by revolution, each of which revered its revolutionary forebears. Yet now that their founding revolutions had settled into power and were beginning to expand, neither seemed able to imagine that new revolutions might spring up against them. The believed they were different from the old European empires. They believed they were exceptional. – A von Tunzelmann, “Blood and Sand”

When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.
– M Atwood, “The Handmaid’s tale”

They kept order the way our poor species has ever learned to keep order. We think there must be better ways but we never learn them — always the whip, the rope, and the rifle.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I don’t know where being a servant came into disrepute. It is the refuge of a philosopher, the food of the lazy, and, properly carried out, it is a position of power, even of love. I can’t understand why more intelligent people don’t take it as a career—learn to do it well and reap its benefits. A good servant has absolute security, not because of his master’s kindness, but because of habit and indolence. It’s a hard thing for a man to change spices or lay out his own socks. He’ll keep a bad servant rather than change. But a good servant, and I am an excellent one, can completely control his master, tell him what to think, how to act, whom to marry, when to divorce, reduce him to terror as a discipline, or distribute happiness to him, and finally be mentioned in his will.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn’t that they are monstrous, offensive and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same as the problem with evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape - at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports - because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desire, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else.
– K Harris, “Lands of lost borders”

It has happened to choruses of encouragement from the West, primarily from Silvio Berlusconi, who appears to have fallen in love with Putin. He is Putin’s main European champion, but Putin also enjoys the support of Blair, Schroeder and Chirac, and receives no discouragement from the transatlantic junior Bush.
– A Politkovskaya, “Putin’s Russia” (on the West and the rise of Putin, 2004 elections)

“Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

And in our time, when a man dies — if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments — the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil? — which is another way of putting Croesus’s question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: “Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?”
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight — the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

This doesn’t mean that people want to live under authoritarian communist regimes again. But if there is a longing for the old days of the Soviet Union, says Fodor [Éva Fodor, hungarian sociologist], “the nostalgia is mainly for a caring state. […]”. The promise of state socialism wasn’t luxury. But it did offer a community, a welfare net, and a guarantee of work that staved off some of the alienation that had made people vulnerable to abuse or exploitation - and this has been especially true for women.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

Population - maintaining its size and controlling it is crucial to understanding the rise of inequality and patriarchal power.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

As ethnic and religious nationalists have always known, there’s nothing quite as powerful as having an enemy against which a people’s sense of cultural identity can be asserted.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

As much as religion can feel like a set of beliefs that is fixed and eternal, religious mening has always been manipulated to suit the politics of the day.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

Part of the privilege of having power is being able to pour your definition of what is moral, natural, or authentic into your mould.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

It is the sarcasm of the 19th century to represent liberty as a woman, while not one single woman throughout the length and breadth of the land is as yet in possession of political liberty.
– M Joslyn Gage, during/after the protests for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, 1886

The most dangerous of any form of oppression is that it can make people believe that there are no alternatives.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

Patriarchal control is, in one sense, no different from any other. What sets it apart is that it operates even at the level of the family.
– A Saini, “The Patriarchs”

Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

Poverty is diminished life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential.
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, by-product of capitalism, as some pro-business defenders claim today.
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

We need only to vote yes on policies that lead to private opulence and public squalor and, with that opulence, build a life behind a wall that we tend and maintain. We may plaster our wall with Gadsden flags or rainbow flags, ALL LIVES MATTER signs or BLACK LIVES MATTER signs. The wall remains a wall, indifferent to our decorations.
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

This country of ours should be in the business of helping its people create wealth, but it should not be in the business of heavily subsidizing it. Why are we so focused on increasing the wealth of the already wealthy when millions languish in poverty?
– M Desmond, “Poverty, by America”

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. […] Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.
– R Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”

We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home that we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are?
– R Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”

Do you know why books such as this as so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. The book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more “literary” you are.
– R Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”

Where do we get from here? would books help us? Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. and number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the intersection of the first two.
– R Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”

‘If everybody fought for nothing but his own convictions, there wouldn’t be any wars,’ he said.
– L Tolstoy, “War and Peace”

Che poi Medioevo lo dite voi, io dico milleduecentottantaquattro, poi voi lo chiamerete come vi pare, le epoche gli si dà nome dopo. Le dittature, ad esempio, se ne parla male solo dopo, intanto tutti se le puppano. Volete vedere?
– S Benni, “Le Beatrici”

Time

“It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.” “And memory.” “Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Every man has a retirement picture in which he does those things he never had time to do—makes the journeys, reads the neglected books he always pretended to have read.
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?”
– J Steinbeck, “East of Eden”