Once more unto this month’s collection of quotes.

Nudity is only taboo because we make it so. Let’s normalise it and break free from societal norms.
[unknown]

The only time of learning is from age nine to sixteen; afterwards, Cupid begins to tyrannise, jealousies, marriage and worldly cares intertwine with studies. It is a mistake to keep boys at their books at an age more proper for matrimony, when their minds chiefly run on propagating their race. Nature will be nature at 18+. At this age their information is like writing on greasy parchment: it will not stick or leave an imprint. Trying to educate boys over eighteen is like painting anew on an old picture: the colours will not be imbibed.
[John Aubrey, quoted un Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life]

I’m at that age where my mind still thinks I’m 29, my humour suggests I’m 12, while my body mostly keeps asking if I’m sure I’m not dead yet.
[unknown]

Since Einstein the future of time has become even more precarious.
[Prof. Janna Levin]

There is no objective time – past, present and future are all a matter of your own perspective.
[Dr Kate Mack]

Calories (noun): Tiny creatures that inhabit your closet and sew your clothes a little bit tighter every night.
[unknown]

I feel like a lot of my problems would be solved if I had a dragon.
[unknown]

The truth has no defence against a fool determined to believe a lie.
[Mark Twain]

Don’t call it getting undressed. Call it returning to factory settings.
[unknown]

Every time you open a book and read, a tree smiles, knowing there’s life after death.
[unknown]

Though many desire these treasures, none enter but he who knows the key and how to use it.
[Anthony Powell; Temporary Kings]

Reason is given to all men, but all men do not know how to use it. Liberty is offered to each one of us, but few learn to be free. Such gifts are, in any case, a right to be earned, not a privilege for the shiftless.
[Anthony Powell; The Kindly Ones]

We’re trained in obedience and rule-following from a very young age. We need equivalent practice in breaking rules, in recognizing when a rule or law is unjust and needs to be broken, and in acting in accord with that recognition. We need this all the time, but damn if we don’t need it especially now. One day, possibly soon, we will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Be ready.
[Mandy Brown]

There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.
[Audre Lorde]

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]

So here’s your collection of recently encountered quotes for this merry month of May. And a long, and somewhat cynical (ie. realistic) list it is!

Poverty is the mother of crime.
[Marcus Aurelius]

Hearing people say they are going to vote Reform because they have tried the others and it is worth giving Reform a chance. This is rather like saying we’ve tried cats, dogs and rabbits, let’s try a rattlesnake as a house pet.
[Dave Middleton]

These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.
[JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion]

I’m not telling you to make the world better, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.
[Joan Didion]

The ones who send you to die will never stand where the bullets land.
[Ernset Hemingway]

War is not fought for nations – it is fought so a few men can turn blood into profit.
[Major-General Smedley Butler]

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?
[Terry Pratchett]

Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.
[Socrates]

I hate math tests because all through the chapter it’s like really easy and then you think you’ve got it and then the test is like:
If I throw a triangle out of the car and the car is going 20km/h and wind resistance is a thing that exists, how many cupcakes can Pedro buy with one human soul?
[unknown]

We cannot have sustainable energy because it threatens the oil industry. We cannot have healthcare because it threatens insurance. We cannot have peace because it threatens the weapons industry. Capitalism built a system where doing the right thing is treated like bad business.
[Brian Tyler Cohen]

We live on a planet where whales sing songs that travel for miles. Where trees can recognize their own offspring and protect them underground. Where dolphins give each other names and where lightning can create glass in the sand. Where horses can read human emotions. Where rain has a smell before it even arrives and where the ocean can glow in the dark. A planet where the stars we see might not even exist anymore.
[unknown]

Shalimar, the trumpets chorused, angels wholly all shall take.
Those alive will meet the prophets, those at peace shall see their wake.
[Keith Reid, Whaling Stories, 1970]

When objects need accounts, ownership becomes cosplay.
[Kamil Murkowska; https://blog.kamilamurko.cc/the-subscription-of-everything/]

You will be told that you are empowered because you can customize your plan. You will be told that the system is flexible because you can cancel anytime. You will be told that everything is designed around you, which is true only in the sense that a maze is designed around a mouse.
[Kamil Murkowska; https://blog.kamilamurko.cc/the-subscription-of-everything/]

I like software that updates without requiring me to understand anything about drivers, patches, or the dark emotional life of printers.
[Kamil Murkowska; https://blog.kamilamurko.cc/the-subscription-of-everything/]

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.
[John Pilger (1939 to 2023)]

The rich do not feed society; workers do. Farmers grow food, drivers move it, nurses heal, teachers teach, builders build, coders code, and labor keeps the world alive. Billionaires mostly own, extract, and profit from what others produce. If the rich vanished, work would continue. If workers vanished, the rich would have nothing to exploit.
[unknown]

Welcome to this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes!

Understand this, you can sound confident & have anxiety. You can look healthy but feel bad. You can look happy & be miserable. You can be good looking & feel ugly. So be kind because every person is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
[unknown]

Women who orgasm from penetration alone carry an older blueprint – a leftover from a time when the body needed the feedback loop of penetration to trigger ovulation.
[Sarah Ward; https://substack.com/home/post/p-190982511]

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life’s bright mysterious expectations.
[Iris Murdoch]

When all seems lost and there is no hope left, remember that this time will pass and, you will look back and see how it made you stronger.
[unknown]

Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.
[Hesiod]

Where do bad rainbows go?
To prism. It’s a light sentence, but it gives them time to reflect.
[unknown]

Forgetting is not a flaw. It is a function. It allows movement. It allows redefinition.
[Kamila Murkowska]

Man’s a kind of missing link, fondly thinking he can think.
[Piet Hein]

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
[Robert Hanlon]

The Shepherds Delight. Both by Day and by Night. Describing the Shepherds simplicity; And their Felicity: their birth, and their mirth: their lives, and their wives: their health and their wealth: their ways, and their plays: their diet, and quiet. And how with their Dam’sels they laugh and lye down, And to each pretty Virgin, they give a green gown.
[English 17th-century Broadside Ballad found in Samuel Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge]