And so, once more, we arrive at this month’s collection of quotes.

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If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health.
[Noam Chomsky]

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I have nothing against football. It just seems very wasteful losing two hours of my life to watch 22 millionaires on TV chasing a bag full of wind in their underwear.
[Guy Martin]

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The ethos of naturism is not about renouncing the comforts and advances of modern life. Instead, it challenges us to rethink our relationship with our own bodies and those of others within the context of these advancements. It posits that one can embrace technology, culture, and societal progress while also advocating for a more natural and less inhibited experience of human existence … [N]aturism promotes a lifestyle where equality prevails. In a naturist setting, the social hierarchies and status symbols that often divide us in clothed society … lose their significance. Without these markers, individuals interact as equals, fostering an environment where respect for the individual is paramount, and judgments based on appearance are minimized.
[Nancy M; https://justnaturism.com/understanding-the-difference-between-naturism-and-primitive-living/]

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In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken”, and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
[Carl Sagan]

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The human body is the best work of art … Naturism is not about sex. Naturists vary in their sexual orientation similar to the general population. Naturism does not mean they are all asexual but despite what people think, a gathering of naked people doesn’t make for a sexually charged environment.
[Dr Vian Aziz, https://twitter.com/VIANAZIZFRCOGUK/status/1771956625139441911]

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Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
[John Donne, To His Mistress Going to Bed, 1572-1631]

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If you have the power to turn another planet into Earth, then you have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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Common sense evolved to help us negotiate the world as we see it – comprising middle-sized objects and low velocities – and we ought not to expect it to help much beyond that domain.
[Eric Schwitzgebel, New Scientist, 23/03/2024]

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We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
[Denis Diderot]

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The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
[Richard Dawkins]

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Christianity. The popular belief that a celestial Jewish baby who is also his own father, born from a virgin mother, died for three days so that he could ascend to heaven on a cloud and then make you live forever only if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your lord & master so he can remove an evil force from your spiritual being that is present in all humanity because an immoral woman made from a man’s rib was hoodwinked by a talking reptile possessed by an malicious angel to secretly eat forbidden fruit from a magical tree.
[unknown]

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Religion. The practice of training your mind to ignore evidence, logic, and reason, while being able to believe in fairy tales based on faith alone … and being proud of it rather than ashamed!
[unknown]

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Atheism is not a negation of anything. You don’t have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man’s ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems.
[Madalyn Murray O’Hair]

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Science is not about building a body of known “facts”. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.
[Terry Pratchett]

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Naked is as modest as you can get! You have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
[unknown]

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Herewith my latest collection of recently encountered quotes which interested or amused. And a good long list it is this month …

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Naturism … is much more than simply shedding one’s clothes. It is a philosophy deeply ingrained in the principles of freedom, equality, and respect. At its core, naturism advocates for the acceptance of the human body in its natural, unadorned state. This acceptance goes beyond mere tolerance, striving to cultivate a sense of self-respect and a respectful acknowledgment of others, regardless of their physical attributes. The movement encourages individuals to view the body as normal and natural, rather than an object of sexualization or shame.
[Nancy M; https://justnaturism.com/understanding-the-difference-between-naturism-and-primitive-living/]

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A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
[Jerry Seinfeld, American comedian and actor]

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Education is not memorizing that Hitler killed 6 million Jews. Education is understanding how millions of ordinary Germans were convinced that it was required. Education is learning how to spot the signs of history repeating itself.
[Noam Chomsky]

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Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.
[JRR Tolkien]

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I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.
[Tony Benn]

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I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
[Alan Watts]

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Speak to people in a way that if they died the next day you’d be satisfied with the last thing you said to them.
[unknown]

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The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a coincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people.
[Carl Jung]

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When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
[Carl Sagan]

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Atheism is what happens when you read the bible. Christianity is what happens when somebody else reads it for you.
[Bertrand Russell]

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Your call is in a queue. We are experiencing a completely normal volume of calls at the moment, but we don’t see a business benefit in hiring more staff.
[unknown]

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The current obsession with nostalgia and remake culture is easy to understand when you realize that it’s a symptom of a culture that isn’t allowed to imagine a future.
[unknown]

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I prefer working with women. No one has to win or lose, they just get the job done.
[unknown]

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The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. The less you know, the more you think you know everything. Knowledge is humbling. Ignorance is arrogant.
[Richard Feynman]

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The only labour-saving invention that reliably works is a general strike.
[Thomas Fuchs, @thomasfuchs.at]

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You have to accept the fact that sometimes you’re the pigeon and sometimes you’re the statue.
[Claude Chabrol, French film director]

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Collective anger is a form of wisdom in a society plagued by numbness. Stoicism won’t save us. Sometimes the most credible response to the terrors of the world is rage.
[Cole Arthur Riley]

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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
[Christoper Hitchens]

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Christianity did not become a major religion by the quality of its truth, but by the quantity of its violence.
[Michael Sherlock]

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The King of England lies dying and one of his sons has been exiled. A princess has vanished. Plague stalks the land and the Treasury has been plundered.
NOW is the time for strange women lying in ponds to distribute swords to form the basis of government.
[Paul Tichonczuk, @paultk@mastodon.social]

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Welcome to this month’s collection of quotes recently encountered. So in no particular order …

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All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.
[John Trudell]

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Tell me your favourite weird fact … The Earth is covered in corpses. We breathe the air the dead exude, eat the food they nourished with their decay, pour their remains into our cars, wear them and sleep on them. And then we call them scary without even noticing that they are present in every single thing of our lives. We live because of the dead.
[unknown]

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Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
[Jacob Bronowski]

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Once you’ve understood, that you can’t understand everything you start to be wise.
[unknown]

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A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not.
[Bertrand Russell; British philosopher and logician (1872–1970)]

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There seems to be a complete difference of style between the things that human beings do and the things that nature does, even though human beings are themselves part of nature. On the one hand, nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles. And for some reason or other, we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track of. And, you know, we say to people, “Well, let’s get things straightened out”, “Let’s get it ironed out”, “Let’s get it all squared away”. And then, somehow, we think we understand things when we have translated into terms of straight lines and squares. Maybe that’s why they call rather rigid people squares. But it doesn’t fit nature.
The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. And only when human beings get to working on things – they build buildings in straight lines, and try to make out that the world isn’t really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.
[Alan Watts]

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Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.
[Epicurus]

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When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren’t scary, they’re actually predictable, they won’t explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.
But that’s not true anymore.
User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don’t click. Buttons don’t even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can’t move or remove them – a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you’re not looking, hide menus, bury options, don’t respect or don’t remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction – feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization – all that fundamental Don Norman shit – have been completely discarded.
My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there’s nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It’s a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.
[AlexC; @neuralex@neurodifferent.me]

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Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
[CG Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (1875–1961)]

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It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.
[Samuel Pepys; Diary; 21 January 1660/61]

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While the best of our physical theories are really excellent – wonderfully predictive – not one of them is complete. When applied in the wrong situation, they fail. That’s just the way it is. So it’s pretty clear, I think, that physics has no guarantee of arriving at a final theory.
Instead, my bet is it’s going to be successive approximations to reality all the way down. You’ll do better and better, but you’ll never get there. Because to get there, in my world view, you have to have experimental checks of predictions, and experiments are finite: they cannot explore all eventualities to all accuracy. So my conclusion is that we’ll never get there.
[Prof. Jim Peebles; New Scientist; 27 January 2024]

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Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
[John Adams (1735–1826), American statesman and Founding Father]

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It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
[Nicolo Machiavelli, c.1505]

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The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered, by interest taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by the nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far distant from the egoist’s own affairs.
[Anthony Powell, A Buyer´s Market (1952)]

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Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
[Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility]

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Earth, water, fire and air
Met together in a garden fair,
Put in a basket bound with skin.
If you answer this riddle,
If you answer this riddle,
You’ll never begin.
[Robin Williamson (Incredible String Band); “Koeeoaddi There” from album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968)]

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

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

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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)]

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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]

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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/]

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

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

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

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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]

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

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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]

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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]

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

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