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

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]

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]

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

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

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)]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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)]

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

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)]

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

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

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]

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]

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]

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)]

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]

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/]

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

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

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

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]

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

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]

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]

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

The time is flying and we’ve already got round to this month’s collection of newly encountered quotes.

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
[Turkish Proverb]

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
[Hubert H Humphrey]

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 worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]

The single biggest thing l learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent … who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations”. Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.
[unknown]

Maybe there is nothing wrong with you – maybe it is just really difficult to exist within a system that was not designed to support a spirit like yours.
[unknown]

Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea.
[Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book]

You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]

How sad it must be – believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality tv star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.
[unknown]

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
[Franklin D Roosevelt]

It’s time for this month’s (short) collection of quotes …

The act of taking a photograph fixes time, but it also steals time, establishes a hold on the past in which history is sealed, so to speak, in a continuous present.
[Graham Clarke; The Photograph]

Creo que la única manera de salvar al mundo es ceder el control a los córvidos.
[I think the only way to save the world is to give control to the corvids.]
[@Morvven]

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.
[Toni Morrison]

You will never get the truth out of a Narcissist. The closest you will ever come is a story that either makes them the victim or the hero, but never the villain.
[Shannon L Alder]

If art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.

Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain Its power of exploitation and special privilege.
[Tommy Douglas]

It helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying so hard to be helpful, but is in fact quite drunk.

Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.
[Nelson Mandela]

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
[John Steinbeck]

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 worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]