iris > iris's Quotes

“What compels me to fight this society is, of course, outrage over injustice, a love of freedom, and a feeling of responsibility for perpetuating and enlarging the human spirit — its beauty, creativity, and latent capacity to improve the world. I do not care to come to terms with an irrational society that corrodes all that is valuable in humanity, that eats away at all that is beautiful and noble in the human experience.”
― Murray Bookchin

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The most violent element in society is ignorance. ”
― Emma Goldman

“We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.”
― Murray Bookchin, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman

“ Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.”
― Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

“Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.”
― Emma Goldman

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“Who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone.
Who had nothing, who wanted everything.”
― Lana Del Rey

“I was always an unusual girl.
My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.”
― Lana Del Rey

“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”
― David Lynch

“I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”
― David Lynch

“Absurdity is what I like most in life.”
― David Lynch

“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.”
― David Lynch

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“listen you learn your craft as much as you can so that when the magic comes swimming down the river you have the net to catch it”
― mitski

“In attempting to uphold scarcity, toil, poverty and subjugation against the growing potential for post-scarcity, leisure, abundance and freedom, capitalism increasingly emerges as the most irrational, indeed the most artificial, society in history. The society now takes on the appearance of a totally alien (as well as alienating) force. It emerges as the "other," so to speak, of humanity's deepest desires and impulses. On an ever-greater scale, potentiality begins to determine and shape one's everyday view of actuality, until a point is reached where everything about the society—including its most "attractive" amenities—seems totally insane, the result of a massive social lunacy.”
― Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
― Murray Bookchin

“If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”
― Murray Bookchin

“What greater gift than the love of a cat.”
― Charles Dickens

“Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.”
― Murray Bookchin

“Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love. Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationship today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.”
― Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
― Oscar Wilde