Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
― Rousseau

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cem Anos de Solidão

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody poor.
Mercy no more could be,
If all were happy as we.”
― William Blake

“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Character is destiny”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“The road up and the road down is one and the same.
(ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή)
—Fragment 60”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem—unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and ani­mals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Diseases desperate grown,
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
― Bertrand Russell

“If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”
― Bertrand Russell

“One must care about a world one will not see.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”
― Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

“all human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.”
― Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason