Nate E > Nate's Quotes

“The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“A path is made by walking on it.”
― Chuang Tzu

“[V]iolence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.”
― Edward Abbey

“Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime”
― Theodor Adorno

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”
― Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz

“The work of memory collapses time.”
― Walter Benjamin

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”
― Gary Snyder

“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
― Gary Snyder

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900