Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“They walked over land once forested for centuries. Farming had destroyed the trees; cities had destroyed the farms; time had destroyed the cities. The land remained, slowly covering its degradation with new plant life.”
― Helen Mary Hoover

“An indispensable good transported to the far corners of the world, black gold had become the very vector of the industrial vascular network, the blood of human technology.”
― Matthieu Auzanneau

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can't, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The capitalist shark breathes oil, but the ocean in which it swims is drying up.”
― Steve Hallett, Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds,
insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a
real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who
lost this game; now it is the planet.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.”
― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.”
― T.C. Boyle

“Global crude oil reserves are like a huge, melting glacier that shrinks, floods, and fertilizes side valleys hitherto deserted, out of reach.”
― Matthieu Auzanneau

“The increase in barrel prices strongly contributed to inflation, which then triggered an escalation in interest rates, an increase that caused the explosion of the subprime bubble.”
― Matthieu Auzanneau