Potent Quotes

The following quotes are others' reflections on the relationship of the individual to a civilization in atagonistic opposition to the nature of Earth, upon which he was born and cannot leave and, considering culture's lack of regard for its habitat, shouldn't. Although writing at different times in our history from vastly different perspectives, there emerges a theme from such variations which I find enlightening by recognizing in others that same "gnawing at the heart" I have lived with all my life.
I've broken the collection down into four catagories: Human, Humanity, Earth, Stewardship
Human, The Pearl Diver
The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.
-Gary Zukav, author (1942- )
It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
-Will Durant, historian (1885-1981)
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.
•
A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.
-Edward De Bono, consultant, writer, and speaker (1933- )
It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in itsfirst meaning, is a mask.It is rather a recognition of the fact thateveryone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role.
-Robert Ezra Park, sociologist (1864-1944)
Spiritual superiority only sees the individual.  But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes—we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different.  But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.
— Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes,  The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
—Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)
It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truthsbefore their times.
-Thomas Brackett Reed, politician (18391902)

To freely bloom - that is my definition of success.
-Gerry Spence, lawyer(b. 1929)
My greatest skill has been to want but little.
-Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood.
-Chinese Proverb
The real measure of our wealth is how much we'd be worth if we lost all ourmoney.
 -John Henry Jowett, preacher (1864-1923)
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.
-Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
-Eli Khamarov
The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would
suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.
-Brendan Gill, writer and preservationist (1914-1997)
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and painter (1930-1965)
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
•
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
— John Keats, Letter, 14 Feb.-3 May 1819, to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats
There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with artlessness.
-Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)
Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
-Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
-Wallace Stevens, poet (1879-1955)
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may,
-- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
-John Constable, painter (1776-1837)
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
-Maxim Gorky, author (1868-1936)

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.
-Roger Miller, musician (1936-1992)
My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.
-Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
-Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)
'Tis with our judgements as our watches: none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
-Alexander Pope, poet (1688-1744)
Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to tohide them.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld, writer (1613-1680)
Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day.
-Albert Camus,writer and philosopher (1913-1960)
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times. 
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
-J.D. Salinger, writer (1919- )
God has no religion
•
If you don't find God in the next person you meet,
it is a waste of time looking for him further.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually hasa son who thinks he's wrong.
-Charles Wadsworth
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
-Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
-Friedric Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
As the archeology of our thought easily shows,
man is an invention of recent date.
And one perhaps nearing its end.
—Michel Foucault,  The Order of Things
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
-H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of
what they had seen. -Louis L'Amour, novelist (1908-1988)
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men — each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
— G. K. Chesterton, "Wine When it is Red"
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
-Federico Fellini, film director, and writer (1920-1993)
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
-John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where
teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
-Arthur Koestler, novelist and journalist (1905-1983)
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
-Naguib Mahfouz, writer (1911- )
When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange---my youth.
-Sara Teasdale, poet (1884-1933)
As I grow to understand life less and less,
I learn to live it more and more.
-Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
I was never less alone than when by myself.
-Edward Gibbon, historian (1737-1794)
...the word maya, by which this peculiar unreality is described, is not necessarily a term of contempt, as if the world were merely an illusion to be dismissed. Maya also means art and magic, and thus a seeming solidity evoked by divine power. But under the spell of this power, one does not feel oneself entirely a victim. However obscurely, one knows or feels that the source of this enchantment is in some roundabout way oneself -
as if being alive and human were to have got oneself deliberately lost in a labyrinth.
-Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God, (1963)
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
•
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
-Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
-Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)
The light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic (1772-1834)
(for my comments click here)
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
-Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
An effective human being is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
—Ida P. Rolf, Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structions
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
-Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet,dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
This world is divided roughly into three kinds of nations: those that spend lots of money to keep their weight down; those whose people eat to live; and those whose people don't know where their next meal is coming from.
-David S. Landes, author, professor of economics and history (1924- )
To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers - or both.
-Elizabeth Charles, writer (1828-1896)
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all. — André Gide, "Literature and Ethics"
A man is not old until his regrets take the place of dreams.
-Yiddish proverb
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
—Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
-Ambrose Bierce, writer
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
-Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)

Humanity, The Kinship
Alone we stand, united we lean
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
-Jacques Barzun, professor and writer (1907- )
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
-Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
-Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)
To find a person who will love you for no reason,
and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.
-Robert Brault, software developer, writer (1938- )
Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.
-Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)
The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love togive, not our kind.
-Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)

If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.
-Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we'relooking for the source of our troubles,
we shouldn't test people for drugs,we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
-P.J. O'Rourke, writer (1947- )
A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

-ArnoldToynbee, historian (1889-1975)
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from thevexation of thinking.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher(1803-1882)

Nothing produces such odd results as trying to get even.
-Franklin P. Jones
The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
-Madame de Stael, writer (1766-1817)
Consider love. Presupposing free will in others is the requisite for falling in love. It is the existence of a discriminating awareness on the other end that is the source of any possible thrill, attraction, and respect.
——Daniel Rirdan, Ecovillage proposer (1966 - )
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
-Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
-Woody Allen, author, actor, and filmmaker (1935- )
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less
important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
-AldousHuxley, novelist (1894-1963)
I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
-Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)
I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.
-Booker T.Washington (1856-1915)
One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
-Charles A. Beard, historian (1874-1948)
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
•
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief ... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
-Walter Lippman, journalist (1889-1974)
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
-H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, andcritic (1880-1956)

The object of most prayers is to wangle an advance on good intentions.
-Robert Brault, software developer, writer (1973- )

Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don'twant,
to impress people they don't like.
-Will Rogers, humorist (1879-1935)
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town.
A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
-Emily Bronte,novelist (1818-1848)
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
-Archibald MacLeish, poet and librarian (1892-1982)
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives. -Albert Schweitzer, (1875-1965)
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
-Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people.
A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)
The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.
-Chinese proverb
War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
-Karl Kraus, writer (1874-1936)
This world is divided roughly into three kinds of nations: those that spend lots of money to keep their weight down; those whose people eat to live;\ and those whose people don't know where their next meal is coming from.
-David S. Landes, author, professor of economics and history (1924- )
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
-Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world wouldoccasionally swap history books,
just to see what other people are doingwith the same set of facts.
-Bill Vaughan, journalist (1915-1977)
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
-James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
-Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and youare out there.
-Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
 –Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men —
each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war
appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
-Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)
The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions,
for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
-Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)
If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. —Alice Meynell, "Solitude"
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
-H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
-Neil Postman, professor and author (1931- )
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but alsointernal violence of spirit.
You not only refuse to shoot a man, but yourefuse to hate him.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.
-Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (1935- )
What's done to children, they will do to society.
-Karl A. Menninger, psychiatrist (1893-1990)
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member,
but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.
— Henry David Thoreau, Journals, entry for 14 March 1838.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.
It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
-William Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
— Denis Diderot, On Dramatic Poetry
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles,
there is complicity.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.
-Jean Arp, artist and poet (1887-1948)
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it.
Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
-Gore Vidal, writer (1925- )
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
•
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
-Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
-Dwight David Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. -Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
-Don Marquis, humorist and poet (1878-1937)

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum. -Henry Miller, novelist (1891-1980)

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. — Lao Tsu

Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle. -Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. -Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger. -W. Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. -Barnett Cocks

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.
—-Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) [The Devil's Dictionary, 1906]

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. -Ivan Illich, priest (1926-2002)

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.  
—Albert Einstein

Humans -- who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals -- have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them -- without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.
-Carl Sagan, astronomer and author(1934-1996) &
Ann Druyan, author (1949- ) [Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,1993]

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
-Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sGod has no religion.

Earth, The Neighborhood

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
-Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist(1883-1931)

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years . Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
 ——Gore Vidal, "Gods and Greens,"

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
-William Blake, poet, engraver, and painter (1757-1827)

Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.
— Guillaume Apollinaire, "On Painting"

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
-Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)

Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.
-Douglas William Jerrold, playwright and humorist (1803-1857)

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
-John Burroughs, naturalist and writer (1837-1921)

I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do. -Cesar Chavez, farm worker and activist (1927-1993)

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

Nature's law affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you ar your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. -Luther Burbank, horticulturist (1849-1926)

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.
-Edwin Way Teale, naturalist and author (1899-1980)

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. -Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1867-1959)

Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. -Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)

Investing in the health of natural assets could therefore be seen as a form of prudent insurance against abrupt changes and the risk to human well-being that they pose. — Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (the UN's modest attempt to awaken the Politiconomy Industry).

Stewardship, The Assumption

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst."
-- Thomas Hardy

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other
over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous?
And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
-Sam Harris, author (1967- )

Future generations may regard the people of the First World nations as bona fide idiots—blithely driving SUVs and watering golf courses—and regard the people of Third World nations as aspiring idiots. I doubt future generations would understand. It is not that we are idiots; we understand. However, in the end we seem to have as much control over the current social trends as lemmings do over their fate.
——Daniel Rirdan, Ecocommune Planner (1966 - )

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.
——Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Considerations by the Way" (1860).

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher (1905-1980)

For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into "the masses."  And where is the David who can slay this giant?
— Lillian Smith, The Journey

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.
-Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills. -B.R. Myers, author (1963- )

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
-Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a
criminal. -Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and author (1900-1980)

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me. -Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.
-Holmes Rolston III, professor of philosophy (1932- )

If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.
-Fred Menger, chemistry professor (1937- )

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
-Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.
-Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea,whether a good one or a bad one.
-Henry Miller, writer (1891-1980)

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of
a regular government. -Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
-Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything — except his own nature.
— Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, "With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert"

Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
-Amschel Mayer Rothschild, banker (1743-1812)

I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts. — Guillaume Apollinaire, Mercure de France, no. 331

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -Gore Vidal (1925-)

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a flyon a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of atelevision set.
-Raymond Thornton Chandler, writer (1888-1959)

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.
-Samuel P. Ginder, US navy captain

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There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.
— Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart Of The Clock: Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments

Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst. -Walter Weckler

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. -Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, editor and orator (1817-1895)

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Ansel Adams, photographer (1902-1984)

The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. -Mark Twain

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and the government when it deserves it. -Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. -Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink
— E. E. Cummings, La Guerre no. 2 Humankind

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes abillion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. -Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (1920- )

We are, to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will have to be that, as a species, we have had an exciting term of office. — Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. . . He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight. —James Thurber, "Thinking Ourselves Into Trouble,"

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.— H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

Black holes are where God divided by zero.
-Steven Wright, comedian (1955-)

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.
—Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.
-Fred Menger, chemistry professor (1937- )