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Quotes in May

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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]

quotes

Monthly Quotes for April

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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]

quotes

Quotes for March

Here’s my motley collection of quotes for this month …

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.
[Winnie the Pooh?}

The prescription for grown women to be hairless, smooth, curve-less and ageless is a response to a paedophile-dominant media/entertainment industry.
[Jameela Jamil]

Don’t let the fear of being seen stop you from enjoying the sheer joy and freedom of being naked.
[unknown]

It doesn’t have to be this way. Western culture has chosen to exclude and demonise neurodiverse and disabled people, like it does with so many other marginalised groups, in service of the capitalist system.
[Allegra Chapman]

I’m not trying to predict where we are on a trajectory of historical collapse. I’m only pointing out that launching an unprovoked war to overthrow a longstanding enemy under cover of negotiation to resolve a pretextual crisis is the sort of aggression typical of empires in, at a minimum, steep decline.
[Spencer Ackerman; https://www.forever-wars.com/regime-change-in-iran-terms-and-conditions-apply/]

Working class people around the world have no innate desire to go to war with each other. They have to be conned into it by the sociopaths who will profit from it.
[John Lennon]

The context currently is a government cash strapped in a world heading for serious recession who has disproportionately monied the NHS and offers primary care a historically lead role.
[Prof. David Colin-Thomé; https://networks.nhs.uk/blog/gms-contract-2026-2027-reflections/]

Twenty percent of global supply. Gone. Just like that. Because one spray tanned game show host with the strategic instincts of a toddler playing with matches decided he wanted to look tough on television.
[unnamed author; https://ifloz.substack.com/p/trump-fucked-around-here-comes-the]

On the sofa now, a soft nose sticks out from beside a cushion. A head the shape of a bicycle seat follows, eyes flickering in a dreamstate. Nothing says “all is safe” in your tiny world quite like a dog with all four feet to the sky.
[Jen; https://ofhalfimaginedthings.substack.com/p/enough-magic-to-hold-another-day]

I hope to arrive at my death, late, in love, and a little drunk.
[Atticus]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

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Here is February’s collection of recently encountered quotes …

Calling swimming outdoors “wild swimming” is a bit like calling lawn mowing “wild vacuuming”.
[Tom Cox, Substack]

Books and conversations aren’t just tokens to be processed efficiently by our eyes and ears. They are journeys in thinking and experiencing. Journeys that can bring the serendipity and struggle of deeper understanding.
[Adam Kucharski]

One day this summer [1936] I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on the top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again to me, and murmured, “Socialists”, as who should say, “Red Indians”. He was probably right – the ILP [Independent Labour Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank.
[George Orwell; The Road to Wigan Pier]

Furthermore, because God created it, “The Human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve its splendour and its beauty”.
[Pope John Paul Il]

When asked what heralds actually do, I usually produce the rough and ready reply: “We design coats of arms, trace family trees and dress up as playing cards twice a year”.
[Patric Dickinson; The Oldie; 23/09/2022; https://www.theoldie.co.uk/blog/what-does-a-herald-do-by-patric-dickinson-1]

The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook. The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly working away at the atom bomb, are a demonstration of this.
[George Orwell; Tribune; October 1945]

The problem for most people isn’t a lack of organisation. The problem is having too much stuff to manage.
[Julianna Poplin]

People frequently underrate how inefficient things are in practically any domain, and how frequently these inefficiencies are reducible to bottlenecks caused by humans being human.
[David Oks]

We need a government that can hold two truths at once: the immediate, visible urgencies (cost of living, housing, NHS waits) and the structural shifts already transforming what “work” and “opportunity” mean. These aren’t competing priorities … they’re the same priority seen from two distances.
[Martha Lane Fox]

Herd immunity does not require everyone to he immune to the disease in order for the whole population to be protected. By vaccinating enough people, the chain of transmission can be broken, and the disease stopped in its tracks.
[Prof. Kit Yates]

So we have actual fact checkers who know all the facts? Why not create a TV channel where they just give us the facts? We could call it the News.
[unknown]

beliefs, quotes

Monthly Quotes

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Welcome to our first monthly collection of quotes for 2026!

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.
[George Monbiot]

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
[Albert Camus]

Re-examine all that you have been told … dismiss that which insults your soul.
[Walt Whitman]

Realise that you don’t know how lucky you are to live in a country that says, “No, the clergy cannot determine through the state what you may think, what you may do, with whom you may sleep, what you may eat, what you may read”.
[Christopher Hitchens]

Do not spring vengeance upon a defecating enemy and do not disturb him … it dishonours you to harm someone in that condition … In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if other people notice any of your smelly filth.
[The Book of the Civilised Man; 12th century table manners]

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.
[Mark Twain]

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]

Shit life syndrome is by far the biggest determinant of ill-health. We all need decent jobs, diets, a living income, green space, shelter, security, friends, clean air, purpose & kindness. If we focus on these, the economy & NHS will thrive. If we don’t, chronic illness will win.
[Dr Phil Hammond, Twitter]

Aristotle and Maslow both accepted that basic needs such as physiological (food, health and clothing); safety (shelter, education, job security); love & belonging needs (friendship), must exist before an individual, or society, can thrive & develop. Ignore these and society fails.
[Martin Myers, Twitter]

Women, as they get older, become juicier and sexier, more embedded in their truth and who they are, more powerful, and more able to walk through the world caring less. And that is an empowering thing.
[Kate Winslet]

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or we can rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
[Abraham Lincoln]

Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.
[Eckhart Tolle]

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
[Leo Tolstoy]

People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.
[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]