Nathan > Nathan's Quotes

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”
― Kenneth Boulding

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
― Kenneth Boulding

“The political perspective of this book, ironically, is the progeny of the progressive potential of capitalism as an historical system. The joint possibility of universal material well-being and the democratization of society is a product of the capitalist era. But the history of capitalism is a chronicle of the tension between possibilities and limits: democracy and universal affluence in perpetual and ubiquitous conflict with class domination - itself a product of the social organization of capitalist production.”
― Samuel Bowles, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

“Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
― Wendell Berry

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
― Wendell Berry

“Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. ”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
― Wendell Berry

“This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.”
― Plato

“People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

“Creating without claiming. Doing without taking credit. Guiding without interfering. This is primal virtue.”
― Lao Tzu

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Life will go on as long as there is someone to sing, to dance, to tell stories and to listen.”
― Oren Lyons

“Define for yourselves your directions.”
― Oren Lyons

“In our perception all life is equal, and that includes the birds, animals, things that grow, things that swim. All life is equal in our perception.”
― Oren Lyons

“You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters,”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
― Charles Darwin

“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.”
― Émile Durkheim

“This is not the time to reawaken old oppositions, but rather to seek what lies above and beyond all opposition.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

“The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.”
― Friedrich Schelling

“Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through, and order and form nowhere appear to have been original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths. Out of this which is unreasonable, reason in the true sense is born. Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness is its necessary heritage.”
― Friedrich Schelling

“Without contradiction, there would be no life, no movement, no progress, a deadly slumber of all forces.”
― Schelling

“Nature shall be the visible spirit, and spirit, invisible nature.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

“Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the source of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the nexus of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous.”
― Friedrich Schelling

“To see her is a picture—
To hear her is a tune—
To know her an Intemperance
As innocent as June—
To know her not—Affliction—
To own her for a Friend
A warmth as near as if the Sun
Were shining in your Hand.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson