Tom Hodgkinson > Quotes

“In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“I count it as an absolute certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. A nap is a perfect pleasure and it's useful, too. It splits the day into two halves, making each half more manageable and enjoyable. How much easier it is to work in the morning if we know we have a nap to look forward to after lunch; and how much more pleasant the late afternoon and evening become after a little sleep. If you know there is a nap to come later in the day, then you can banish forever that terrible sense of doom one feels at 9 A.M. with eight hours of straight toil ahead. Not only that, but a nap can offer a glimpse into a twilight nether world where gods play and dreams happen.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.”
― Tom Hodgkinson

“If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since. ”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.”
― Tom Hodgkinson

“Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.”
― Tom Hodgkinson

“A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.”
― Tom Hodgkinson

“It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“Education is like pruning ; it wrecks the natural growth of the tree in favour of a form that is useful to commercial society”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.”
― Tom Hodgkinson

“Career is just posh slavery.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.”
― Tom Hodgkinson

“After the alarm clock, it is the turn of Mr Kellogg to shame us into action. 'Rise and Shine!' he exhorts us from the Corn Flakes packet. The physical act of crunching cornflakes or other cereals is portraied in TV advertising as working an amazing alchemy on slothful human beings: the incoherent, unshaven sluggard (bad) is magically transformed into a smart and jolly worker full of vigour and purpose (good) by the positive power of cereal. Kellogg himself, tellingly, was a puritanical health-nut who never had sex (he preferred enemas). Such are the architects of our daily life.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Idle

“Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Existuje pošetilá představa, že nemá cenu něco dělat, pokud v tom nejste absolutně nejlepší, což vede k tomu, že většina z nás nedělá vůbec nic.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids

“We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed. In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle. He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.” In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.” Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind. Freud called introspection “morbid”—unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. The”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free