It’s time again for our monthly round up of recently encountered quotes.
When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. The pain is felt by others. The same thing happens when you’re stupid.
[unknown]
The world is full off horrible things that will eventually get you and everything you care about. Humour and laughter is a universal way to lift your head up and say: “Not today you fuckers”.
[Billy Connolly]
We agreed that the true enemy of man is not man. Our enemy is not outside of us. Our true enemy is the anger, hatred, and discrimination that is found in the hearts and minds of man.
[Thich Nhat Hanh, on his friendship with Martin Luther King]
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
[JRR Tolkien]
The finest clothing made is a person’s skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.
[Mark Twain]
Time to remember the best voting advice I have heard – voting isn’t marriage – it’s public transport. You are not waiting for the one who is absolutely perfect. You are getting the bus. And if there isn’t one going exactly to your destination, you don’t stay at home and sulk you take the one going closest to where you want to be.
[unknown]
I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
[Isaac Asimov]
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
[George Orwell]
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
[Blaise Pascal]
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
[Richard Feynman]
In capitalism, freedom is 80 brands of circus peanut.
[MK, @qualia.bsky.social]
It’s quite rewarding watching KCs, rather than journalists, go after politicians. They’re much better at it. No need to cultivate contacts, no requirement to ensure balance, no pressure to let them talk so they’ll come on the show again – just cutting right through the bullshit.
[Ian Dunt; https://iandunt.substack.com/p/matt-hancocks-broken-half-formed]
Some men improve the world only by leaving it.
[Oscar Wilde]
We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
[Jimmy Carter]
Most of us have forgotten that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, it means that we have lost our connection to ourselves.
[unknown]
There are places, just as there are people and objects and works of art, whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which cannot be analysed.
[Paul Nash]