Michaela > Michaela's Quotes

“We're all travelling heavy with illusions.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
― Howard Zinn

“…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.”
― Pema Chödrön

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.”
― John F. Kennedy

“Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

“The inevitable fact is that satellite technology and space exploration are far more accessible to large institutions, military and corporate, and are hundreds of times more likely to benefit their goals than yours or mine or the Sierra Club's. These space communications technologies were invented to provide a competitive edge to the institutions that invented them, and to assist their intended exploitation of nature. People who wish to live within the confines of the planet's organic limits, and who are not committed to a constantly expanding economy, or to seeking control of resources or land, do not need satellites to map resources. The people who live near what we call "resources" already know they are there, and are happy to leave them in place.”
― Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations

“I believe it is critically important for all Westerners to realize that the idea of the earth not being alive is a new idea. Even today, that view is far from universal and may represent a minority viewpoint, advocated mainly by people who live in Western technological cultures. Failing to see the planet as alive, they have become free of moral and ethical constraints, and have benefited from exploiting resources at the earth's expense. But if the majority of people in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union are comfortable regarding the earth as a huge, dead rock, this is emphatically not true of those Indians and aboriginal peoples throughout the world who continue to live as they have for thousands of years, in direct relationship to the planet.”
― Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations

“It has proven unfortunate for the survival of Indian nations that their way of viewing the world is so drastically at odds with the views of American technological society. Indigenous systems of logic have not led them to emphasize expansion, power, or high-impact technologies of violence. Meanwhile, several aspects of the industrial system, especially in capitalist societies, to celebrate and even require the goals of expansion, growth, and exploitation and the development of the technologies appropriate to those goals. When the two world views come into conflict, we in the industrial cultures have the brute advantage of the violent technologies to help wipe out indigenous cultures; we then interpret this so-called victory as further evidence of our greater fitness to survive.”
― Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people. ”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“I think most of the things we call evil are not evil at all; it is just that we don't understand those things and so we call them evil. And we fear evil only because we do not understand it." - Gabriel Marez”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“... in antidemocratic systems, the function of education is to produce obedient citizens structurally obliged to enter the workforce without bargaining power, and ideologically trained to think that the dominant group represents history’s greatest civilisational forces.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them