Mark > Mark's Quotes

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else while you're uncool.”
― Lester Bangs

“It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.”
― Anne Tyler

“Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.”
― Charles Ives

“The ugly truth is that no employer hires anyone unless they can extract more value from them than they have to pay out in wages and benefits.”
― Chapo Trap House, The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

“Why aren't crazy people content to take over, like, one town? It always has to be the whole word. They can't just control maybe twenty people. The have to control everyone. The can't just be stinking rich. The can't just do genetic experiments on a couple unlucky few. They have to put something in the water. In the air. To get everyone.
I was tired of all of it.”
― James Patterson, Angel

“50 percent of kids with ADHD were shown to no longer have symptoms after having their adenoids and tonsils removed.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.

They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?”
― A.R. Moxon

“Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”
― Thomas Love Peacock

“I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange

“Try a little harder to be a little better.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley

“Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don't judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet. Charity is accepting someone's differences, weaknesses, and shortcomings; having patience with someone who has let us down; or resisting the impulse to become offended when someone doesn't handle something the way we might have hoped. Charity is refusing to take advantage of another's weakness and being willing to forgive someone who has hurt us. Charity is expecting the best of each other.

None of us need one more person bashing or pointing out where we have failed or fallen short. Most of us are already well aware of the areas in which we are weak. What each of us does need is family, friends, employers, and brothers and sisters who support us, who have the patience to teach us, who believe in us, and who believe we're trying to do the best we can, in spite of our weaknesses. What ever happened to giving each other the benefit of the doubt? What ever happened to hoping that another person would succeed or achieve? What ever happened to rooting for each other?”
― Marvin J. Ashton

“The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered "Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
― Dalai Lama

“Before I was famous I had a whole bunch of jobs where all I needed was boots. People would look right past me, or if they did look at me, it was with a mean look. But when I got famous, people would look at me and smile and wonder where they knew me from. If they flat-out recognized me, they'd laugh and dance like they'd won a prize, and I'd just stand there and smile and feel warmth from their love. So the fame made the world, which is a real cold place, a little less cold.”
― Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story: A Memoir

“When it's unexpected, death comes fast like a ravenous wolf and tears open your throat with a merciful fury. But when it's expected, it comes slow and patient like a snake, and the doctor tells you how far away it is and when, exactly it will be at your door. And when it will be at the foot of your bed. And when it will be on your flesh. It's all right there on the clipboards.”
― Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story: A Memoir

“Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Professionals stick to the schedule;
amateurs let life get in the way.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“American’s capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“I called up my grandparents who I hadn't spoken to for over three years. I called my mother, who I had recently told to stop calling lest I contact the police. I sat with them all and it was normal and fun and good. I'm even ready - maybe - to speak to my father. Superman doesn't get upset at the people who shoot bullets at him. I get why, now.”
― Harvey Pekar, American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”
― John McPhee, Annals of the Former World

“Certain English geologists produced confusion by embracing continental drift and then drawing up narratives and maps that showed continents moving all over the earth with respect to a fixed and undriftable England.”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

“George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose “Woodcraft,” published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.”
― John McPhee, Coming into the Country

“Since most callers have until moments before been completely unaware that there are bears in New Jersey, there is often in their voices a component of alarm, up to and including terror. McConnell’s response is calmer than pavement. She speaks in tones that range from ho to hum. “Yes, there are bears in your area,” she says, and goes on to say, with an added hint of congratulation, “You live in beautiful bear habitat.”
― John McPhee, Table of Contents

“Just keep moving and hope the next place will be better. It has to be. Just around the next bend, everything is beautiful. And it breaks my heart.”
― Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

“Feeling guilty because you “failed to think positively enough,” “didn’t have enough faith,” or didn’t reach some “ideal” is damaging to your psyche and your physical body.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway