Once more unto the quotation mines, my friends …

Nudists don’t take their clothes off, we get dressed when we have to!

Well, today my neighbours spoke to me. So I did what I had to do. I strapped a monitor on my ankle, went outside with my shirt on inside out, and argued with a pine tree. That should hold them off for a while.

Imagine yourself alone in the midst of nothingness, and then try to tell me how large you are.
[Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928)]

We need leader not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity.
[Martin Luther King]

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
[TS Eliot]

No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means.
[Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960)]

You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong, you lack empathy not religion.

“You sound a very educated man for a barbarian,” said Rincewind.
“I didn’t start out a barbarian. I used to be a school teacher. But I decided to give it all up and make a living by the sword.”
“After being a teacher all your life?”
“It did mean a change of perspective, yes.”
“But … well … Surely … the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death …”
Mr Saveloy brightened up. “Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?”
[Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times]

What I have found to be true for me in my … periods of derangement is that all the ‘shoulds’ line up and march about skreeking at me in a never ending loop of recrimination that don’t help a damn bit. I might be mental but I’m not fucking stupid … I know what I ‘should’ do, but one of the quirks of my poor mental health is I find it almost impossible to do the things I ‘should’ do because I am not very well. I have found that reminding myself of all the ‘shoulds’ that I can’t do generally tends to make me feel about a thousand times worse until they eventually paralyse me completely. I do not subscribe to ‘shoulds’. I subscribe to whatever gets me through the day.
[Katy Wheatley at https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-school-of-me]

Don’t let anyone else ruin your day. It’s your day. Ruin it yourself.

OK, guys & gals, time for my August collection of recently encountered quotes.

I have a difficult relationship with regeneration projects. All around me I watch as multi-million pound businesses build massive, overpriced penis extensions that loom over the patchwork of housing estates below, waiting to jizz all over them until at some stage, everyone will live on a dinghy in the Thames and have to catch eels with their toes to survive. The theme in Canary Wharf is to build empires of plate glass in which thousands of feet of marble clad floor are troubled only by a potted fig and three, uncomfortable Japanese chairs which nobody is allowed to sit on. Wealth here is measured by how much space you can squander.
[Katy Wheatley; https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/where-plaistow-patricia-meets-vera]

1. History is not there for you to like or dislike.
2. History is there for you to learn from it.
3. History offends you? Even better. Then you are less likely to repeat it.
Please read this out loud, then read it again. Then teach it to your children and grandchildren.
[Andrea Junker]

Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
[Taylor Swift]

Human, the only species on Earth that shames its own body.
[Kendree Miller, Photographer]

“My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.”
Hughnon reflected that “entirely transparent” meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all.
[Terry Pratchett; The Truth]

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
[CS Lewis; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
“In 1984“, Huxley added, “people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
[Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death]

“You know why trees smell the way they do?” Murphy asked, looking up from her hammering.
“Sap?” Logan guessed. “Chlorophyll?”
Murphy shook her head. “Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years’ worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old.”
[Frances O’Roark Dowell, Where I’d Like to Be]

Tranquillity comes when you stop caring what they say. Freedom comes when you stop caring what they think.
[Marcus Aurelius]

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. You’ve nothing to worry about there.
[James Herriot]

Have you ever heard that patter-pitter of tiny feet? Or the dong-ding of a bell? Or hop-hip music? That’s because, when you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Bish bash bosh. So politicians may flip-flop, but they can never flop-flip. It’s tit-for-tat, never tat-for-tit. This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.
[Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence]

Meanwhile, time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.
[Martin Amis, The Information]

[NYT] couldn’t show any vibrators. America is a puritan country, remember? We have all these uptight evangelicals here.
[Marilyn Minter, interviewed in The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/16/an-honest-depiction-of-elder-sex-marilyn-minters-best-photograph]

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
[Jimi Hendrix]

I can write down a few words and make people thousands of miles away, whom I have never met and will never meet, laugh tears of joy and cry tears of true sorrow for people who do not exist and have never existed and never will exist. If that isn’t actual literal magic I don’t know what is.
[Neil Gaiman]

This month’s selection of quotations encountered.

War against a foreign county only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
[George Orwell]

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
[CS Lewis]

Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.
[George Carlin]

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archaeological dig. I was talking to one of the archaeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favourite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theatre, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure to someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with
the myth of Talent, that l thought it was only worth doing things you could “Win” at.
[Kurt Vonnegut]

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they‘ll hate you.
[Don Marquis]

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well.
[Mark Twain]

It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.
[Nikola Tesla]

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.
[Julian Barnes]

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
[Michelangelo]

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
[Jon Stewart]

It’s the invention of clothes, not nature, that made “private parts” private.
[Mokokoma Mokhonoana]

Here’s this month’s collection of quotes …

What a con these “so-called” cats are. They’re supposed to have been domesticated since 7500BC. In that time, we humans have come up with the wheel, medicine, aeroplanes, art, the internet and much more. Yet cats are still shitting in flowerbeds and bringing us half-chewed mice as gifts. You’d think that with the thick end of 10,000 years of living with us under their belts, they’d have learned to occasionally bring us a nice bottle of wine or even an Amazon voucher or something to show their appreciation.
[Private Eye?]

The air in a man’s lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived – Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
[Jacob Bronowski]

We need to reduce production of private jets, SUVs, commercial airlines, mansions, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, arms, cruise ships – there are huge chunks of our economy that are mostly organized around capital accumulation, and are wasteful and destructive and totally irrelevant to human well-being. We can also ban the practice of planned obsolescence and introduce policies to expand product lifespans. When products last twice as long, we will need half as many. Finally, we urgently need to cut the purchasing power of the rich, using basic sensible policy tools such as wealth taxes and maximum income ratios.
[Prof. Jason Hickel]

Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class – the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
[George Carlin]

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
[Carl Sagan]

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
[Johannes Kepler]

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[Douglas Adams; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]

Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is – absurd.
[Richard Feynman]

The physical act of passing through a doorway is the reason why you often walk into a room and completely forget what you were doing. Because going through a door signifies the beginning or end of something, this creates an “event boundary” within your mind. Basically, every time you go through a doorway, your brain starts filing away thoughts from your previous location to make room for a new group of memories in the next.
[unknown]

In the Ramtop Village they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock he wound up winds down – until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
[Terry Pratchett]

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
[George Whitman]

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
[Voltaire]

Every child needs to learn how to cook, learn how to cultivate a garden, plant seeds, learn about sustainability, be taken to a garden and be able to put their hands in the earth.
[Alice Waters]

Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine, and sex?
[Ancient Roman saying]