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]
And this afternoon I looked out at 16 green parakeets sitting neatly arranged in a row on two branches of the oak tree, one above the other. Of course by the time I’d counted them and could get a camera they’d all shuffled untidily about.
Sorry not a brilliant photo as it was taken looking into the light.
