"It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests - and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear. "
— Upton Sinclair

"If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy."
— Upton Sinclair (The Jungle)

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
— Upton Sinclair

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
— Rachel Carson

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in."
— Rachel Carson

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life."
— Rachel Carson

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
— Rachel Carson

"But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself."
— Rachel Carson

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed."
— Anne Rice

"I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural."
— Anne Rice

"Listen up -- there's no war that will end all wars."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"In dreams begin responsibilities."
— William Butler Yeats

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved."
— Sue Monk Kidd

"All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession."
— Mary Roach

"Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to."
— Mary Roach (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife)

"I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam)

"However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"...Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel)

"I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel)

"God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves. "
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"It's what you do that makes your soul."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"A mother's body remembers her babies..."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Bean Trees)

"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

""Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. [...] Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of---not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder: Essays)

"Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country's shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who'd watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
— George Orwell (1984)

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
— George Orwell (1984)

"
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. "
— George Orwell

"The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good....These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice--how we relate to one another.
For instance, [Elizabeth A.] Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how "he crushes his enemies" and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive.
Likewise, if the key symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)