Mark Wagnon > Mark's Quotes

“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
― Wendell Berry

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When I am afraid to speak is when I speak.
That is when it is most important.”
― Nayyirah waheed

“Desire is the kind of thing that
eats you
and
leaves you starving.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“there have been so many times
i have seen a man wanting to weep
but
instead
beat his heart until it was unconscious.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“i have never understood.
will
probably never understand.
the white mans lust
to eat the world.
to eat the universe. (mars is next)
why he was born with such a rabid
starvation.
why he feigns for power
like
crack rock. doing everything. and anything.
to have it.
no matter how deranged.
why he is in so much pain
he needs to rip the roots of happiness
from the earth
and
burn them into
his smile.
what happened in his relationship with our mother.
that he needs to set a person on fire.
watch them burn.
to
feel powerful.
not every white man
is
born this way,
but,
it stands to remain
there are many
who
are.”
― nayyirah waheed

“If someone does not want me it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“remember,
you were a writer
before
you ever
put
pen to paper.
just because you were not writing
externally.
does not mean you were not writing
internally.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
― Joan Robinson

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
― Nikola Tesla

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment...”
― Nikola Tesla

“Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.”
― David Bohm

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.”
― David Bohm

“Ultimately, all moments are really one, therefore now is an eternity.”
― David Bohm

“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

“As awareness grows, appreciation grows too. As appreciation grows, so does empathy.”
― Jon Young, What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World