Here is this month’s collection of assorted quotes.

The Auditors had tried to understand religion, because so much that made no sense whatsoever was done in its name. But it could also excuse practically any kind of eccentricity.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time]

The body’s not a problem to be solved. It is the place we live.
[Unknown]

It’s not necessarily that I’m thinking, “Oh, this object has its own will,” but how do we respect previous relationships that this object had that are still relevant today? Because some of them don’t expire. For example, the material relationship between a stone and the mountain it was a part of. Even if that rock goes away from the mountain, they’re still connected, and they live in a different timeline because mountain time is different from human time.
[Gala Porras-Kim]

The cars usually don’t have what’s called a “soul” until an hour before they’re supposed to have a person driving them. I don’t know all the details, but basically you can’t connect to the car, you can’t do anything with it, you can’t adjust its settings at all until it has a soul. And for some reason they don’t get a soul until an hour before a shift starts.
[Interview with a Waymo Robotaxi Handler]

When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong … or absolutely right.
[Albert Guinon]

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true.
[William Blake]

Don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal. Don’t use love as a game or weapon. Respect the earth, and don’t abuse its gifts. All are familiar ethics that we somehow forget, or manage to sidestep, when we just don’t feel like thinking about consequences.
[Stephanie JT Russell]

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something – something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance – did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.
[Aldous Huxley]

The last irrational, moralistic taboo in America is that of public nudity. There is no difference between an Iranian woman being arrested for going out in the streets without her hair covered and an American woman being arrested for stepping out her front door without a top on. Nobody can give a rational explanation for anti-nudity laws. The government uses, instead, abstract terminology like “disturbing the peace” or “public indecency”. Without realizing it, we criminalize nudity on strictly moral grounds, based on ancient and outdated religious biases that have no place in a modern society.
[https://writersdisease.blogspot.com/2013/04/nudity-is-future.html]

The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.
[unknown]

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]