How have we got to our last monthly collection of quotes for 2024?
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
[Maxímilíen Robespierre]
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the 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 American 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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995]
I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
[F Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby]
My naked body is not a sexual display. It is simply a normal, natural, living part of me.
[unknown]
Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.
[Brené Brown; Atlas of the Heart]
I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout in the wind – how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.
[Pierce Brown; Art of Poets]
… understand it as well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.
[Ada Lovelace]
This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful – showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up – and sometimes unhelpful – when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them.
[Angus Deaton]
All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. Your house is a garbage processing centre where you buy new things, bring them into your house, and slowly crapify them over time. Objects start at the highest level, visible in a living area. From there it goes down to a closet cupboard or drawer; that’s only why we have these, so we don’t have to see all the huge mistakes we have made. From the closet it goes to the garage – one of the longest phases in trashification; no object has ever made it out of the garage and back into the house – or a personal storage unit. This is the saddest of all. Now instead of free garbage you pay rent to visit your garbage.
[Mike and Joelle; https://www.facebook.com/mikeandjoelleofficial/reels/]
And if you think that a bit of placebo effect, encouragement by
[Dr Rowley Cottingham]