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]