Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to


One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very
high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing
in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything


The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence,
is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of
reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance


Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society


How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me


Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore


Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it


Malcolm Muggeridge
English writer (Observer of Life)
(Born this day 1903)



Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream

[Tamrin]

Man is never perfect, nor contented


Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes
which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth


Now when an American has an idea, he directly seeks a second American
to share it. If there be three, they elect a president and two secretaries.
Given four, they name a keeper of records, and the office is ready for work;
five, they convene a general meeting, and the club is fully constituted


What good would it be to discuss such a proposition,
when force could destroy the best arguments?


The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy.
It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides


He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely
believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem


Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best


Jules Verne
French sci-fi author (Around the World in 80 Days)
(Died this day 1905)



We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones

[Tamrin]

It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are
schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to him-
self he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are
constantly being told, is as old as man himself. Nothing could be further from the truth


Nobody wanted this commercialization of life


The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society


To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of
comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery


It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control
do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people


For one who has read the works of Marx it is frightening to look back
at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly
hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing


When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as
individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether
we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it


Robert Heilbroner
American economist and historian of economics
(Born this day 1919)



He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter

[Tamrin]

Education has failed in a very serious way to convey
the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism


The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to
recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in
which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home


And that, quite simply, is the issue. We live in a finite world with
finite resources. Although it may sometimes seem quite big, earth is
really very small – a tiny blue and green oasis of life in a cold universe


Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences.
It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles


The question is whether we're going to start taking the steps now to
avoid the really big jumps that are in store if we don't do something now


The voluntary approach to corporate social responsibility has failed in many cases


The one thing I feel is very hopeful, however, is the over-
whelming participation of women in the movement for change


Dr. David Suzuki
Japanese-Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist
(Born this day 1936)



We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and
everyone’s arguing over where they're going to sit

[Tamrin]

[Tamrin]

Tuesday’s Quotes:

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things


There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They
rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of
events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect.
Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism


Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything
is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings.
Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world


To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and
wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extra-
ordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite


There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is
holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revel-
ation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body


Moral Action is that great and only Experiment, in which all
riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves


We are near waking when we dream that we dream


Bro. Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (aka Novalis)
German author, philosopher and poet
(Died this day 1801)



True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all
existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world

[Tamrin]

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social
development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liber-
ation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppress-
ion, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the
first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity


For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital
concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all capacities
and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account


The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater
or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength


Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece
of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when
any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace


We should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a
necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous con-
clusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events


All social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so
inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other.
We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a rule, can
be clearly recognised but cannot be calculated according to scientific methods


A truly free man does not like to play the part of either the ruler or the ruled. He is,
above all, concerned with making his inner values and personal powers effective in a way
as to permit him to use his own judgment in all affairs and to be independent in action


Rudolf Rocker
German-born Anarchist, writer, historian and prominent social activist
(Born this day 1873)



I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal,
but because there is no such thing as a final goal

[Tamrin]

Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness


No war is inevitable until it breaks out


The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve
the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight


No matter what political reasons are given for war,
the underlying reason is always economic


Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University
Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists.
If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves


There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace
with the Establishment — and nothing more corrupting


The crusade against Communism was even
more imaginary than the specter of Communism


A.J.P. Taylor
British historian, Nuclear Disarmament campaigner
(Born this day 1906)



The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long

[Tamrin]

You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery


There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight
for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort


It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privi-
leged world" and "the forgotten world". The privileged world consists of the affluent,
developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in
which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the
Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations,
where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population,
live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace


Producing food for 6.2 billion people, adding a population of 80 million more a year,
is not simple. We better develop an ever improved science and technology, include-
ing the new biotechnology, to produce the food that's needed for the world today


In response to the fraction of the world population that could be fed if current farm-
land was converted to organic-only crops: "We are 6.6 billion people now. We can
only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear." In response to extreme
critics: "These are utopian people that live on Cloud 9 and come into the third world
and cause all kinds of confusion and negative impacts on the developing countries"


I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the
research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The
more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use
this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk
positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one
billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot


Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth,
but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of
hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels.
If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty
years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and
be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things


Norman Borlaug
American agricultural scientist (Green Revolution)
Nobel laureate (Peace, 1970)
(Born this day 1914)



Reach for the stars. Although you will never touch them, if you reach hard
enough, you will find that you get a little star dust on you in the process

[Tamrin]

1 of 2

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally


There are all kinds of truth... but behind all of them
there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth


Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough
information about life to last him the rest of his days


Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better


To expect too much is to have a sentimental view
of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness


The old woman was the kind who would not cut
down a large old tree because it was a large old tree


I don't deserve any credit for turning the
other cheek as my tongue is always in it


Flannery O'Connor
American novelist and essayist
(Born this day 1925)



You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd