Scoots > Scoots's Quotes

“A change of meaning is necessary to change this world politically, economically and socially. But that change must begin with the individual; it must change for him... If meaning is a key part of reality, then, once society, the individual and relationships are seen to mean something different a fundamental change has taken place. (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)”
― David Bohm

“The short answer to the question of what I'll miss most is Shin, my husband of thirty-one years, and the faces of my children.
The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all the rest.
And I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether my children's lives will prove as lucky as my own.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Economists sometimes joke that if a man marries his housekeeper, the GDP of the country declines. If, on the other hand, he sends his mother to an old-age home, it increases again. In addition to the joke saying a lot about the perception of gender roles among economists, it also shows how the same kind of work can be counted or not counted as part of the GDP.”
― Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Economics

“Actually, the idea of economic man is an efficient way of excluding women. We have historically allocated women certain activities and said that she must do them because she is a woman. Then we create an economic theory that states that these activities have no economic meaning.”
― Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Economics

“We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“We minimize our anger, calling it frustration, impatience, exasperation, or irritation, words that don't convey the intrinsic social and public demand that 'anger' does. We learn to contain our selves: our voices, hair, clothes, and, most importantly, speech. Anger is usually about saying "no" in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but "no.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“Boys who grow up seeing themselves everywhere as powerful and central just by virtue of being boys, often white, are critically impaired in many ways. It’s a rude shock to many when things don’t turn out the way they were told they should. It seems reasonable to suggest media misrepresentations like these contribute, in boys, to a heightened inability to empathize with others, a greater propensity to peg ambition to intrinsic qualities instead of effort and a failure to understand why rules apply or why accountability is a thing. It should mean something to parents that the teenagers with the highest likelihood of sexually assaulting a peer and feel no responsibility for their actions are young white boys from higher-income families. The real boy crisis we should be talking about is entitlement and outdated notions of masculinity, both of which are persistently responsible for leaving boys confused and unprepared for contemporary adulthood.”
― Soraya Chemaly

“If there is a word that should be retired from use in the service of women's expression, health, well-being, and equality, it is appropriate - a sloppy, mushy word that purports to convey some important moral essence but in reality is just a policing term used to regulate our language, appearance and demands. It's a control word.

We are done with control.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah - scrutinising and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can't see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. That is the nature of science.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“To make a mess that another person will have to deal with - the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack - is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich

“...most people, including me, tend to applaud the wrong things: the showy, dramatic record-setting sprint rather than the years of dogged preparation or the unwavering grace displayed during a string of losses.”
― Col. Chris Hadfield

“Emotional Labour: The f Word, by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox

"Work inside the home is not always about chores. One of the most onerous roles is managing the dynamics of the home. The running of the schedule, the attention to details about band practice and sports training, the purchase of presents for next Saturday’s birthday party, the check up at the dentist, all usually fall on one person's shoulders. Woody Allen, in the much-publicised custody case for his children with Mia Farrow, eventually lost, in part because unlike Farrow, he could not name the children’s dentist or paediatrician. It’s a guardianship role and it is not only physically time consuming but demands enormous intellectual and emotional attention.

Sociologists call it kin work. It involves:

'keeping in touch with relations, preparing holiday celebrations and remembering birthdays. Another aspect of family work is being attentive to the emotions within a family - what sociologists call ‘emotion work.’ This means being attentive to the emotional tone among family members, troubleshooting and facing problems in a constructive way. In our society, women do a disproportionate amount of this important work. If any one of these activities is performed outside the home, it is called work - management work, psychiatry, event planning, advance works - and often highly remunerated. The key point here is that most adults do two important kinds of work: market work and family work, and that both kinds of work are required to make the world go round.' (Interview with Joan Williams, mothersandmore.org, 2000)

This pressure culminates at Christmas. Like many women, Jane remembers loving Christmas as a child and young woman. As a mother, she hates it. Suddenly on top of all the usual paid and unpaid labour, there is the additional mountain of shopping, cooking, cleaning, decorating, card writing, present wrapping, ritual phone calls, peacekeeping and emotional care taking. And then on bloody Boxing Day it all has to be cleaned up. If you want to give your mother a fabulous Christmas present just cancel the whole thing. Bah humbug!”
― Jane Caro and Catherine Fox

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”
― David Bohm

“If your economy requires people to consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy”
― Jason Hickel