Trevor Schaefer > Trevor's Quotes

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Australians: Men who forked snakes in the sun-baked desert, and popped the eyes out of dingoes with old ANZAC rifles, and surfed between gaping shark mouths, all while downing 20oz. cans of Victoria Bitter. Men trained by gap years padding about Thailand and India in a drunken stupor, flipping off the local constabulary. These men, friends of the groom, would dare each other to feats of athletic drinking. One of them, called Bonko or Rhino, would collapse off his chair half conscious as his comrades hooted with raucous delight.”
― Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist

“The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness. “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals, and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the twenty-first century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.”
― Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

“WHILE “BUDDHISM” SUGGESTS another belief system, “dharma practice” suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“In today's liberal democracies we are brought up to realize our potential as autonomous individuals. It is hard to envisage a time when so many people have enjoyed comparable freedoms. Yet the very exercise of these freedoms in the service of greed, aggression and fear has led to breakdown of community, destruction of the environment, wasteful exploitation of resources, the perpetuation of tyrannies, injustices and inequalities. Instead of creatively realizing their freedoms, many choose the unreflective conformism dictated by television, indulgence in mass-consumerism, or numbing their feelings of alienation and anguish with drugs. In theory, freedom may be held in high regard; in practice it is experienced as a dizzying loss of meaning and direction. (p.110)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“Australian History:

.... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator - Part 7

“Australian History does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort. No mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures and incongruities and contradictions and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.”
― Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad / Following the Equator / Other Travels

“Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving ('I want this," don't want' that"), you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance. Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. As with understanding anguish, the challenge in letting go of craving is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“While originating in acts of imagination, orthodoxies paradoxically seek to control the imagination as a means of maintaining their authority. The authenticity of a person's understanding is measured according to its conformity with the dogmas of the school. While such controls may provide a necessary safeguard against charlatanism and self-deception, they also can be used to suppress authentic attempts at creative innovation that might threaten the status quo. The imagination is anarchic and potentially subversive. The more hierarchic and authoritarian a religious institution, the more it will require that the creations of the imagination conform to its doctrines and aesthetic norms.
Yet by suppression of the imagination, the very life of dharma practice is cut off at its source. While religious orthodoxies may survive and even prosper for centuries, in the end they will ossify. When the world around them changes, they will lack the imaginative power to respond creatively to the challenges of the new situation.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening