Kris Haynes > Kris's Quotes

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#1

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

tags: boredom, emotion, passion

402 likes

#2

“In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

tags: discordian, discordianism, eternity, humor, joke

473 likes

#3

“For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

418 likes

#4

“Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

tags: inspirational, life, wisdom

117 likes

#5

“One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

tags: bias, science, skepticism, worldview

257 likes

#6

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

tags: august-1914, ignorance, prejudice, tolerance

1142 likes

#7

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.”
― Frank Zappa

tags: open-mindedness, simile

1499 likes

#8

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: democracy, elite, elitism, elitist, voter, voting

2717 likes

#9

“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

tags: 9-11, 9-11-01, 99-percent, atheism, evangelicalism, fox-news, future-prediction, globalism, media, media-barons, media-of-the-united-states, mysticism, nostradamus, occupy-wall-street, outsourcing, prediction, predictions, proud-ignorance, reality-tv, reason, rupert-murdoch

1142 likes

#10

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
― Edmund Burke

tags: doomed-to-repeat-it, history, learning, school

1016 likes

#11

“Emotions can override…the more powerful fundamental motives that drive our lives: hunger, sex, and the will to survive. People will not eat if they think the only food available is disgusting. They may even die, although other people might consider that same food palatable. Emotion triumphs over the hunger drive! A person may never attempt sexual contact because of the interference of fear or disgust, or may never be able to complete a sexual act. Emotion triumphs over the sex drive! And despair can overwhelm even the will to live, motivating a suicide. Emotions triumph over the will to live!”
― Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life

38 likes

#12

“The words consent of the governed have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

69 likes

#13

“Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers -- and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

46 likes

#14

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

tags: identity, opinions

11929 likes

#15

“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”
― Bette Davis

tags: clichés, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, misogyny, opinions, speaking-out, stereotypes, women

6175 likes

#16

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

tags: ignorance, intelligence, opinions, stupidity

3104 likes

#17

“The man who fears losing has already lost.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

tags: fear

754 likes

#18

“Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?”
― Lemony Snicket

tags: fear

394 likes

#19

“Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice.”
― Will Smith

tags: after-earth, choice, fear

379 likes

#20

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

tags: activism, adaption, change, development, digital-revolution, future, movement, new-models, p2p, progress, progression, protest, revolution, science, society, structural-changes, technology, world, zeitgeist, zeitgeist-movement

1678 likes

#21

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.”
― Chris Hedges

142 likes

#22

“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

584 likes

#23

“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts

tags: language, metaphysics, names, nominalism, philosophy, power-of-words, words

777 likes

#24

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

1052 likes

#25

“The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

tags: capitalism, corporate-culture, individualism

24 likes

#26

“Our main problem is a lack of understanding of what it means to be human and that we are not separate from nature.”
― Jacque Fresco, The Best That Money Can't Buy

32 likes

#27

“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

730 likes

#28

“Dare to be naïve.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

1888 likes

#29

“When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end.”
― Allan W. Anderson, On Krishnamurti's Teachings: The Collected Writings, Talks and Classroom Discussions of Allan W. Anderson on the Teachings of J. Krishnamurti

5 likes

#30

“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”
― Aaron Swartz

tags: books, curiosity, reading

208 likes

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