Here we are with the first of our monthly round-ups of recently encountered quotes for this year.

Sometimes words aren’t enough and that’s why we have middle fingers.
[unknown]

There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.
[Terry Pratchett, Hat Full of Sky]

If there was an asteroid headed towards earth, [the Republicans] would all get in a room and say y’know what we need? We need tax cuts for the wealthy.
[Barack Obama]

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
[Ursula K Le Guin, 1929-2018]

May the long time Sun
Shine upon you
All love surround you
and the pure light within you
Guide your way on.
[Believed (based it seems on no evidence) to be from an old Celtic lyric poem. Used by Mike Heron of Incredible String Band in the lyrics of “A Very Cellular Song”, on their album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968)]

What we need are garage sales for our souls, to clean out the tattered sweaters of bad memories, the gently used futons of childhood trauma, and the rusty bicycles of unrequited love.
[@EdmondsScanner; https://twitter.com/EdmondsScanner]

Our bodies are like tubes or levers or computers, but they are, above all things, like bags. Bags that are stuffed in other bags, stuffed in still more bags. Our bodies are nesting bag situations like the used bags stuffed under your kitchen sink, with the added bonus of thumbs and anxiety.
[Bethany Brookshire; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-body-is-bags-bags-and-more-bags/]

You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.
[Mahatma Gandhi]

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.
[Bill Nye]

Religions like all other ideas deserve criticism, satire and fearless questioning.
[Salman Rushdie]

Our society tends to view the big blue expanses on maps as mere liquid filler with fish in it.
[Helen Czerski, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/07/ocean-breathing-climate-crisis-carbon-oxygen-helen-czerski-blue-machine]

What is said is never what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said.
[Kevin Powers; The Yellow Birds]

Have spent the last two days writing detailed descriptions of non-human cosplay … you just haven’t lived until you’ve imagined how a worm would wear a wedding gown originally designed for a moose.
[Annalee Newitz; https://wandering.shop/@annaleen/111733412615696439]

Pugwash has two qualities which I believe are present in all of us to some degree: cowardice and greed … It may be that the captain is popular because we all have something in common with him. What would YOU do if you saw a delicious toffee on the nose of a crocodile?
[John Ryan; creator of Pugwash]

I fold my worries into paper planes and turn them into flying fucks.
[unknown]

The time is flying and we’ve already got round to this month’s collection of newly encountered quotes.

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
[Turkish Proverb]

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
[Hubert H Humphrey]

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 worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]

The single biggest thing l learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent … who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations”. Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.
[unknown]

Maybe there is nothing wrong with you – maybe it is just really difficult to exist within a system that was not designed to support a spirit like yours.
[unknown]

Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea.
[Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book]

You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]

How sad it must be – believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality tv star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.
[unknown]

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
[Franklin D Roosevelt]

It’s time for this month’s (short) collection of quotes …

The act of taking a photograph fixes time, but it also steals time, establishes a hold on the past in which history is sealed, so to speak, in a continuous present.
[Graham Clarke; The Photograph]

Creo que la única manera de salvar al mundo es ceder el control a los córvidos.
[I think the only way to save the world is to give control to the corvids.]
[@Morvven]

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.
[Toni Morrison]

You will never get the truth out of a Narcissist. The closest you will ever come is a story that either makes them the victim or the hero, but never the villain.
[Shannon L Alder]

If art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.

Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain Its power of exploitation and special privilege.
[Tommy Douglas]

It helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying so hard to be helpful, but is in fact quite drunk.

Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.
[Nelson Mandela]

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
[John Steinbeck]

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 worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]