Here be this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes; and it is bumper offering this month.
In crisis communication, a well-known formula is: outrage x hazard. So even if the hazard is low, if concern is great, you’d better be speaking with clarity, acknowledging uncertainty, listening to the questions, concerns, and confusion, and bringing people along for the ride.
[Katelyn Jetelina, @yourlocalepidemiologist]
President Trump seems to have an unsatiable need to be the centre of attention. International relations are a serious matter; they concern people’s lives and the stability of entire regions. At times, it feels as though the whole world is being forced to take part in a multibillion-dollar therapy session to compensate for the attention he may not have received in childhood.
[Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iranian Vice President for Strategic Affairs]
To meet a person you are going to marry requires filtering through a lot of people … If you socialise much less, it takes you much longer to find a match if you find one at all … If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards [for a potential partner] are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal.
[Lyman Stone]
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
[Christopher Hitchens]
The Seven Social Sins are:
* Wealth without work.
* Pleasure without conscience.
* Knowledge without character.
* Commerce without morality.
* Science without humanity.
* Worship without sacrifice.
* Politics without principle.
[Frederick Lewis Donaldson]
As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a grove of myrtles made,
Beasts did leap, and birds did sing,
Trees did grow, and plants did spring;
Every thing did banish moan …
[William Shakespeare; “Sonnet to sundry notes of music” from The Passionate Pilgrim (1598)]
And God said “love your enemy”, and I obeyed him and loved myself.
[Khalil Gibran]
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshipping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
The aesthetic evaluation of women before their intellectual evaluation is not a modern phenomenon. It is not an internet glitch. It is not something Andrew Tate invented between supercar videos. It is one of the oldest organising principles in human civilisation.
[Clare Macnaughton]
And the female aesthetic appreciation of the male. Indeed I suggest this is the bedrock of of sexual selection in all species.
Clothes hide the body, but nudity reveals the woman’s soul.
[Christian Dior]
A woman’s body has the beauty of nature. For her, undressing is like the sun dissipating the clouds.
[Auguste Rodin]
Adult life boils dawn to four simple things: Everything is expensive. I don’t know what to eat. I’m tired. Ibuprofen.
[unknown]
Every tiny creature is carrying a life that matters deeply to itself. The bee searching for water, the bird hiding from storms, the frog resting in cool grass. They are not background decoration. They are living souls trying to survive beside us.
[unknown]
Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
[Albert Einstein]
My daughter, then just shy of five … collapsed our entire chain of species inheritance into a single anthropomorphic figure that she called “my monkey grandma”.
[Stephen Phelan, Guardian, 2 June 2026]
The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.
[unknown]