Michael Brickey > Michael's Quotes

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
― Edward Abbey

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Timbuktu. The last pure place. Isolation being the mother of purity. All men are jealous of Timbuktu because Timbuktu is removed from men, it's the wholeness men have fractured, the sacred extreme they've traded away.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
― Jacques Barzun

“The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.”
― Sam Wineburg

“A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.”
― Mark Twain

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You