So here we are again with this month’s selection of interesting and amusing quotes.
Visitors should bear in mind that architects can become extremely excited by plasterboard-wrapped columns, structural grids & road markings.
[Olly Wainwright]
The barn-owl turns in the darkness of an oak, and floats forward over fading giraffe-skins of light and shade …
[JA Baker, September]
In the real world, we have to talk about things and find ways to respect each other’s opinion, even when we disagree. A healthy, mutually satisfying relationship involves celebrating the things you love about each other and ignoring, whenever possible, those quirks that you can’t change.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
When people tell you to be afraid, in an ambiguous, unclear situation, you need to wonder why they want you to be afraid, and what they intend to do with that fear of yours.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
Part of the problem here is that our media thrives on instilling fear and inadequacy in people. They want you to be afraid, to feel anxiety, so that you read their article or watch their television show, all so they can sell you shit via advertisements and commercials. Fear about sex and health are two of their main strategies.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to use violence to protect them … Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible without its being underwritten by violence?
[Stephen Batchelor quoted at http://hardcorezen.info/the-zen-buddhist-who-advises-trump-about-nukes/5561]
Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.
[Dalai Lama]
If you want to go bomb somebody, there’s remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist suffering people, then suddenly we become very cost-conscious.
[Andrew J Bacevich, American historian]
The West won the world by applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grand-children’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
[Carl Sagan, in 1996]
Parenting to grow our sons’ relational capacities is all about staying in conversation with them over the years to help them see how powerful their capacities for communication and expression are. It’s about getting them to that tipping point whereby they commit to their own voice over the scripted silences of traditional manhood.
[Mark Greene; “Why Do We Murder the Beautiful Friendships of Boys?” at https://medium.com/@remakingmanhood/why-do-we-murder-the-beautiful-friendships-of-boys-3ad722942755]