Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“As the aforementioned tanks poured into town, my city's mayor stood behind a podium and said, ‘This country is better than what we're seeing today.’ The hustle is that everyone talks about the ‘today’ as a single day that materialized, untethered, with no connection to any history before it or any history that will come after it. As if a moment is not within a braid of moments that defines a place.“

“We've learned the importance of community in all of these spaces, because it is a tactic of the system to individualize you.” - Xiye Bastida

“The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!”

That I’m reading this right now just got very timely.

“Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore.”

"...And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." [...] "I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

"…And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." […] “I'll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

“Though I am absurdly out of touch with popular culture, I appreciate that culture is the context for everything. It shapes policy, ranks priorities, guides political will. I also appreciate that a constant barrage of bad climate news is unbearable. So my North Star for climate communication is to take climate seriously, but not take *ourselves* too seriously.”

“They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.”

“I would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing. […] I don't believe the architect to be any kind of God, though I would be open to being proven wrong. I imagine, most likely, that we are dealing with one of God's lesser angels. One of the bored and mischievous ones, with too much time on their hands, who disrupted an otherwise reasonably stable emotional cocktail with their own whimsy.”

“In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships […] was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, ‘You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.’”

“And so I set off to figure out, Well, why is that? Why do some technologies stop at the lab? What I found is that there needs to be a rabble-rouser who actually wants to commercialize it. But you also need financing to support it. It's not for the faint of heart.”

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn't matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.”

“I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all.”

“I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all.”

“It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, […] it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern.”

“Another way of saying all this is we need some real citizens. Citizenship has sort of gone out of style in our country. And partly that dates back to this Reagan-era idea that markets were going to solve all problems. And if markets were gonna solve all problems, why would we need to care about civic institutions or being citizens or whatever else?” - Bill McKibben

“I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can't help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could.”

“he, at some point, got caught up with what he called the wrong crowd. […] What is rarely said about these people and about these moments in our lives is that sometimes the wrong crowd is simply the crowd that loves you the best. The crowd that sees you the clearest. Their wrongness perhaps not inherent but cultivated through a series of neglects or unresolved pains.”

"They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions."

“I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don't have the heart to cross it.”

“The call to action is to really be better humans. I don't know how else to put it. Be better humans by understanding that we live for others. Otherwise we don't have much of a reason to live. And when I say "others," I mean also the rest of the environment, all creatures and things. Love is the answer.” - Paola Antonelli (MoMA)

“This word "resilience," just like "sustainability," everyone gets tired of it. But it's important to recognize that resilience is just culture. Culture is the habits, tendencies, patterns, and routines that we collectively share; it's the consequence of persistent circumstance and prevailing conditions. It's crucial that we design and create spaces where culture can thrive.” - Bryan C. Lee Jr., Architect

"They are but poor creatures," said Flora, "these men of Earth. What should they have, if not their Faith? They are certainly robbed of everything else—of a decent world, of a decent life. They are even robbed of the dignity of acceptance on a basis of equality by the rest of the Galaxy. So they retire to their dreams. Can you blame them?"

“In another part of Chicago stood the Institute for Nuclear Research, in which men may have had theories upon the essential worth of human nature but were half ashamed of them, since no quantitative instrument had yet been designed to measure it.“

“…there had been a seismic shift in the public consciousness, as though people wanted to turn down the noise, especially the incredible violence […] As if Boston had become some American version of Northern Ireland, a city that no longer seemed safe, a city that had come apart, Humpty Dumpty lying on the ground in pieces, waiting for all the king's horses and all the king's men to put it back together again.”

“…even if we're looking at a planet that's two degrees warmer, that's not a planet that I particularly wanna live on, but it may be the planet we get. It strikes me as not very useful to throw up our hands like, well, we’re all gonna die, and therefore we don't have to think about how we live better lives on a worse planet.” - Dr. Kate Marvel