This month’s selection of quotations encountered.
War against a foreign county only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
[George Orwell]
One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
[CS Lewis]
Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.
[George Carlin]
When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archaeological dig. I was talking to one of the archaeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favourite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theatre, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure to someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with
the myth of Talent, that l thought it was only worth doing things you could “Win” at.
[Kurt Vonnegut]
If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they‘ll hate you.
[Don Marquis]
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well.
[Mark Twain]
It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.
[Nikola Tesla]
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.
[Julian Barnes]
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
[Michelangelo]
Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
[Jon Stewart]
It’s the invention of clothes, not nature, that made “private parts” private.
[Mokokoma Mokhonoana]