Stephanie Hammer > Stephanie's Quotes

“I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
― Samuel Beckett

“He doesn’t want to see that joy, that freedom, come crashing down, yet again, among the ruins of its own euphoric irresponsibility.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“We are beginning to understand that by the time the conquistadors struck the Andes or Custer reached the Black Hills of South Dakota, only shadow populations of natives remained. The Indian wars got the headlines, but they were mopping-up operations. The shock troops were diseases, especially smallpox, aided by weeds and a few other members of catastrophic agriculture’s evolved coalition.”
― Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

“The British custom of taking tea as an afternoon break has more to do with sugar than with tea. During the nineteenth century, when the custom arose, it was something like the coffee break in modern workplaces, but not so leisurely: a chance to gulp a quick cup of tea, which was invariably laced with sugar. In this way were the human machines of the factory “nourished”—fueled—without even needing to leave their machines.”
― Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

“Between 1970 and 1992, a million farms—36 percent of all American farms—ceased to exist.”
― Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

“The predominant system of farming bolstered by all of this is accurately named industrial agriculture. It is capital-intensive, not labor-intensive, which largely explains the region’s depopulation. Industrial agriculture considers the countryside as a factory.”
― Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

“Finally, there is every indication that Putin’s government worked neither to prevent terrorist attacks nor to resolve crises peacefully when they occurred; moreover, the president consistently and increasingly staked his reputation not only on his own determination to “rub them out” whatever the circumstances but also on the terrorists’ perceived ruthlessness.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

“One thing is certain: Once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible—to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia and, finally, to quell any possible criticism from the West, which, after 9/11, was obligated to recognize in Putin a fellow fighter against Islamic terrorism.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

“And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News

“The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.”
― Edward St Aubyn

“The Park’s nice,’ his father conceded, ‘but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk

“On the metro home that night, I struggled with a dilemma that would haunt me for decades. Was I an activist or an academic?”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia