Seth Kravitz > Seth's Quotes

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
― Dorothea Lange

“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ”
― Richard Avedon

“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”
― Nan Goldin

“Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization. It is lunacy.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“I had watched organics and fair trade explode into billion-dollar industries. But it was hard to say the world was becoming a better place for the marginal spending. In fact, it felt like it was becoming a more insulated one. I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
― E.O. Wilson

“You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
― Pablo Picasso