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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| de133f4 | It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. | politics | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 1bd823d | It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 22cda2a | We've been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2ed7b64 | if you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e80a676 | History is humankind trying to get a grip. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| be59367 | Enough is as good as a feast. And it's when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 61e8067 | We like to blame life for the problems we make, We threaten to change, but it's always a fake; We bitch and moan that everything's wrong, Then we get right back to getting along. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 311a7e8 | The people are suffering. Relieving people's poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate. | poverty suffering | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 6a7e23b | He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists' X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal th.. | science-fiction | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 7c1f141 | If you can't afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 7dc1017 | no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8e71beb | In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| dea2394 | what has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4960fcc | Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since | intelligence | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 793ab75 | Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6c48139 | This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1533ca9 | And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ead77ef | Everyone in California is a Buddhist for fifteen minutes. Then they realize they're not allowed to eat chili dogs and enlightenment starts sounding like a real drag. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| f60707d | Calm down. Deep breaths. Go to your happy place. Oh, wait. I don't have one. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| 6da69cc | Ishmael] listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong here, he had no place in the tree any longer. Some much younger people should find this tree, hold to it tightly as their deepest secret as he and Hatsue had. For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the worl.. | paradox-of-silence unrealized-love | David Guterson | |
| 526e74f | The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded--that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges. | setting | David Guterson | |
| 5b8d970 | If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond. | David Guterson | ||
| 2261544 | And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| e745e4e | There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're i.. | future modern-life today work | Douglas Coupland | |
| c1a62ff | I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I've still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened... | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 102b143 | Aucun representant ne peut exactement representer les besoins d'autrui ; un representant tend a devenir membre d'une certaine elite et jouit souvent de privileges qui erodent l'interet qu'il doit porter aux revendications de ses mandants. Relayee par les elus du systeme representatif, la colere des protestataires perd de sa force ; [...]. Les elus developpent une certaine expertise qui tend a sa propre perpetuation. Les representants passen.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 16696e6 | Aucun changement fonctionnel ou structurel ne peut garantir une societe parfaitement democratique. Nous acceptons mal ce fait parce que nous avons ete eleves dans une culture technologique ou l'on pense generalement que, si on pouvait seulement trouver le bon instrument, tou irait enfin pour le mieux et qu'il serait alors possible de se relacher un peu. Mais on ne peut jamais se relacher. L'experience des Noirs americains, comme celle des I.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 809705c | There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 493d1e5 | Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic modern preface to a war of conquest. Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, leading to the American acquisition of Florida. It appears on classroom maps politely as "Florida Purchase, 1819"--but it came from Andrew Jackson's military campaign across .. | Howard Zinn | ||
| f158325 | WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules." | Howard Zinn | ||
| 54e074f | You can't be neutral on a moving train, | Howard Zinn | ||
| 2851ca7 | The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes--a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich." -- | Howard Zinn | ||
| 55acef6 | The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 9e4a5ea | In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. | Howard Zinn | ||
| dd19476 | If racism can't be shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions. | Howard Zinn | ||
| cc50b6e | Une population parfaitement determinee est en mesure non seulement de contraindre un dirigeant a fuir son pays, mais egalement de faire reculer un candidat a l'occupation de son territoire par la mise en oeuvre d'un formidable ensemble de strategies disponible : boycotts et manifestations, occupations de locaux et sit-in, arrets de travail et greves generales, obstructions et sabotages, greve des loyers et des impots, refus de cooperer, ref.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 6b35cc5 | The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 0dd5798 | Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy." . . . "Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you-- Ye are many, they are few!" | Howard Zinn | ||
| d0298b7 | I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. | Howard Zinn | ||
| accf315 | The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: "Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation." | Howard Zinn | ||
| 0eeb8d9 | There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 70379b7 | Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into .. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 5a69737 | Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie's corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintainin.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 0863482 | Black is a good color anytime you're flinging around blood. | Richard Kadrey |