Bry Willis > Bry's Quotes

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Faith is only a word, embroidered.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
― David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
― Malcolm X

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Addresses

“An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. Similarly, the negativity of the world can’t put you down unless you allow it to get inside you.”
― Goi Nasu

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps
moving but does not make any progress.”
― Alfred A. Montapert

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”
― John F. Kennedy

“No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives’, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find. It is not hard to plumb our mental depths because they are so deep and so murky, but because there are no mental depths to plumb.”
― Nick Chater, The Mind is Flat

“The truth is that digital transformation is actually not about adapting to new technology at all — it's about directing an organisation to be more adaptive to change itself.”
― Lindsay Herbert, Digital Transformation: Build Your Organization's Future for the Innovation Age

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.”
― Michel Foucault

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”
― Heraclitus

“Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.”
― Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
― Karl Marx

“Justice is not natural among people, but the struggle for justice is the most noble act in society. Because justice may not be possible, but as it’s the way toward the desired society for each one to live in, that’s why its struggle is noble and regard as the highest act.”
― Zaman Ali, GOVERNMENT Servant, Not Master

“Language is the source of misunderstandings.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
― H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

“Let it be known, I am a fan of the comma; it gives cadence to my witting. Those who disagree are in their usual hurried state…not giving pause where a breath is due.”
― Nanette L. Avery

“Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isnt in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I dont, see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it, But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,,”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire