Linda > Linda's Quotes

“What happens to other species also happens to us.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
― John Lennon

“Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons.”
― Michael Jackson

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
― Sir Walter Scott

“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work

“Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz

“There are two visions of America a half century from now. One is of a society more divided between the haves and the have-nots, a country in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools, and have access to first-rate medical care. Meanwhile, the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education, and in effect rationed health care―they hope and pray they don't get seriously sick. At the bottom are millions of young people alienated and without hope. I have seen that picture in many developing countries; economists have given it a name, a dual economy, two societies living side by side, but hardly knowing each other, hardly imagining what life is like for the other. Whether we will fall to the depths of some countries, where the gates grow higher and the societies split farther and farther apart, I do not know. It is, however, the nightmare towards which we are slowly marching.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Inside the KGB offices, staff members were busy burning all the files. Putin later stated, “We burned so much stuff that the furnace exploded.”46 He recounts that despite the local office’s efforts to get the Soviet military to come to their rescue, and in general to defend their positions in East Germany, “Moscow was silent. . . . I only really regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls . . . cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away. . . . We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.”
― Karen Dawisha, Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
― Mark Twain

“Thrivability emerges from each of us holding the persistent intention to be generative: that is to say, to create more value than we consume.”
― Jean M. Russell, Thrivability: Breaking Through to a World That Works

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich

“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”
― MARY CATHERINE BATESON

“The most recent estimate is that a mere 400 individuals in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans taken together -- a degree of wealth concentration that is accurately, not rhetorically, properly designated medieval.”
― Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution

“Look! You look, Mr Stone Eagle!' I shout down the telephone. 'This one's big time. This one's different. Do you know where the people behind your superquarry came from — names like McAskill and Kelly? They came from places like the Hebrides and Ireland in the Celtic world. Over here. They got pulled like weeds from their own land and transplanted onto yours. Don't you see? We're both from superquarry-threatened communities. We're both from communities that got fucked over, yes, fucked over. They cleared the native people and now they're wanting even the rocks.”
― Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Alan Alda

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
― Isaac Asimov

“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
― Isaac Asimov

“They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

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

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment”
― Lao Tzu