1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5322
5323
5324
5325
5326
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 04d0184 | The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom--a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.) | Michael Pollan | ||
| 9f185f2 | Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside of Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. ... Louis (XVI) hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly.. | plant science | Michael Pollan | |
| 785046c | I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley | Michael Pollan | ||
| 337123e | psychedelic therapy creates an interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior can be learned. | Michael Pollan | ||
| edd394f | psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan | Michael Pollan | ||
| 0b155d7 | We don't die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die, and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in an ICU. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death. Sure, it's gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn't exist not so long ago. But to a doctor, it's still an insult to let a patient go. | Michael Pollan | ||
| b24ecc2 | Yet the new research into psychedelics comes along at a time when mental health treatment in this country is so "broken"--to use the word of Tom Insel, who until 2015 was director of the National Institute of Mental Health--that the field's willingness to entertain radical new approaches is perhaps greater than it has been in a generation. The pharmacological toolbox for treating depression--which afflicts nearly a tenth of all Americans an.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| d970081 | He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.* The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don't merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry--the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt .. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 8ea0e84 | wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple -- at least five per apple, several thousand per tree -- that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree's adopted home. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 55ff182 | With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn't a people on Earth who doesn't use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn't use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousne.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 5ec92d3 | It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) . | Michael Pollan | ||
| 24b468c | Amanda Feilding, who was born in 1943, is an eccentric as only the English aristocracy can breed them. (She's descended from the house of Habsburg and two of Charles II's illegitimate children.) A student of comparative religion and mysticism, Feilding has had a long-standing interest in altered states of consciousness and, specifically, the role of blood flow to the brain, which in Homo sapiens, she believes, has been compromised ever sinc.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| afca12e | Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come--whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-cir.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| ec7307a | The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn't very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn't exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, t.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 91a0a7e | Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don't. What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of i.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 8b33841 | Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. There | Michael Pollan | ||
| 77fee96 | Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of Health Services: "Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them." -- | Michael Pollan | ||
| 10ad11e | whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water--of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make c.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 3078b0b | It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 76d7c4a | I hope whatever you're doing, / you're stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 5610396 | If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access "cosmic consciousness," or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 2a1c3d0 | But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure for alcohol addiction. | Michael Pollan | ||
| ec3a995 | The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 031c008 | Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain. | Michael Pollan | ||
| be59545 | Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity. | food health homemade obesity | Michael Pollan | |
| a5ae5f4 | SHOP THE PERIPHERIES OF THE SUPERMARKET AND STAY OUT OF THE MIDDLE. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 2b71293 | Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again. | farm food local sustainable | Michael Pollan | |
| b125630 | Never does a star grace this land with a poet's light of twinkling mysteries, nor does the sun send to here its rays of warmth and life. | R.A. Salvatore | ||
| f8c4993 | It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian's deliberate assault on the mind . . . . Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can be followed without investment of a new emotion.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| d416260 | The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It | Chris Hedges | ||
| c71a3bd | The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. | Chris Hedges | ||
| e917bbc | This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us. | Chris Hedges | ||
| b726ee8 | Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin's purges, captured the surreal experience of living in the embrace of totalitarianism. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism, and terror. Omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary ex.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 77a4ccc | the portrayal of reality in the state-controlled press and popular entertainment is harmonious and pleasant. Justice, in the narratives approved for public consumption, is always served. Goodness always triumphs. Goals are always attained. This dichotomy, although not on the level of Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Nazi Germany, is nevertheless present in American culture and getting worse. The gap between who we are and who we think we a.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 737f955 | The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 695c073 | The superior force of despotic regimes is disarmed not through violence but through conversion. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 81a2c52 | All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit, | Chris Hedges | ||
| 5552d12 | The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908--led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover--was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups--especially those led by African Ame.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 494b314 | Force," Simone Weil wrote, "is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates."2" | Chris Hedges | ||
| 6120c6c | We are saved not by what we can do or accomplish but by our fealty to revolt, our steadfastness to the weak, the poor, the marginalized, and those who endure oppression. We must stand with them against the powerful. If we remain true to these moral imperatives, we win. And I am enough of an idealist to believe that the struggle to live the moral life is worth it. Chris Hedges, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress | Amy Friedman | ||
| fbe8c20 | The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system. | Chris Hedges | ||
| bf52ef3 | In rallies like those in Johnson's Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, t.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 10091e8 | The rebel, dismissed as impractical and zealous, is chronically misunderstood. Those cursed with timidity, fear, or blindness and those who are slaves to opportunism call for moderation and patience. They distort the language of religion, spirituality, compromise, generosity, and compassion to justify cooperation with systems of power that are bent on our destruction. The rebel is deaf to these critiques. The rebel hears only his or her inn.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 3cec479 | A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods." -- | Chris Hedges |