Kirk > Kirk's Quotes

“Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.”
― Utah Phillips

“Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
― Blaise Pascal

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

“It takes two people to plant a tree, and they should take their time over it, for they cannot have anything more important to do with the time saved by haste.”
― Lawrence D. Hills, Good Fruit Guide

“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”
― Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom

“At its best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while.’

I am still working hard to make this ‘while’ worthwhile.

— I.B.S., ‘Author's Note,’ July 6, 1981.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

“The attitude of Oregon pioneers toward the Indians was recorded by Father John Beeson, one of the early settlers. Of his fellows, most of whom were from Missouri, he wrote: ‘Among them it was customary to speak of the Indian man as a buck, the woman as a squaw, until at length, in the general acceptance of the terms, they ceased to recognize the rights of humanity in those to whom they were so applied. By a natural and easy transition, from being spoken of as brutes, they came to be thought of as game to be shot or vermin to be destroyed.’

Any white man found dead was assumed to have been murdered by Indians, and often his death was made an excuse for raiding the nearest Indian village and killing all the men, women, and children found there. In one instance an elderly white miner who had refused to participate in such raids was called on by a score of men and forced to join them. Father Beeson related, ‘After resting on the mountains, they shot him, cut off his head, leaving it on the limb of a tree, and divided his property among themselves.”
― Wayne Gard, Frontier Justice

“When the dead person cries, it is a sign that he is on the road to get well,’ said the Crow solemnly.”
― Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”
― Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake

“As Candide went back to his farm, he reflected deeply on the Turk's remarks. He said to Pangloss and Martin: "That good old man seems to me to have made himself a life far preferable to that of the six Kings with whom we had the honor of having supper."
"Great eminence," said Pangloss, " is very dangerous, according to the report of all philosophers. For after all, Eglon, King of the Moabites, was assassinated by Ehud; Absolom was hanged by his hair and pierced with three darts; King Naab son of Jeroboam was killed by Baasha..."
"I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."
"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest."
"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable."
All the little society entered into this laudable plan; each one began to exercise his talents. The little piece of land produced much. True, Cunégonde was very ugly; but she became and excellent pastry cook; Paquette embroidered; the old woman took care of the linen. No one, not even Friar Giroflée, failed to perform some service; he was a very good carpenter, and even became an honorable man; and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds. for after all, if you had not been expelled from a fine castle with great kicks in the backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunégonde, if you had not been subjected to the Inquisition, if you had not traveled about America on foot, if you had not given the Baron a great blow with your sword, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied citrons and pistachios."
"That is well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our garden.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“The blacks have a song which says, 'I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.' No American film, relating to blacks, can possibly incorporate this observation.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”
― Max Weber

“In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove,
And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love.
Slack never thy weeding, for dearth nor for cheape,
The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape.

[Thomas Tusser, ‘Five hundred points of husbandry: directing what corn, grass, is proper to be sown: what trees to be planted: how land is to be improved: with with whatever is fit to be done for the benefit of the farmer in every month of the year’ (1557).]”
― Helen Nearing, Wise Words for the Good Life

“We dined at a vegetarian restaurant with the enticing name ‘I Eat Nobody,’ and Tolstoy's picture prominent on the walls, and then sallied out into the streets.”
― John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World

“Tolstoy was not associated with any revolutionary group but his writings had a tremendous influence. A continuous stream of Utopians, rebels and cranks passed in and out of his doors. When I was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, I was shocked by the depth of his despondency, and after he had forecast, with a foresight given only to genius, the bloody upheavals to come, I left his presence deeply regretting that age, moral distress and spiritual loneliness rendered him incapable of looking joyfully forward to what many believed would be the birth of a great and enduring democratic Russian Republic.”
― Robert Hunter, Revolution Why, How, When?

“The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?”
― Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

“On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a head-dress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. ‘But you surely don't need a hat, Aunt Jane! They're only at the end of the garden.’ ‘It is the custom,’ she said, grandly. ‘Put a scarf over your head.’ Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then — ‘I have to tell you,’ she said, formally, ‘that King George V is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides,’ she added — as though the bees needed the telling! — ‘everyone has to die’.”
― P.L. Travers, What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story

“He went on like this all day, his lips bristling with bright iron brads under his grizzled beard, talking, spitting out nails, hammering them in, grasping, misquoting and singing all at the same time, lively as a leprechaun. "... the spectre of war is haunting Europe!"-bang bang bang-"You have nothing but your chains to lose, Mr. Small, and all the world to gain!"
"Chains?" asked I. Small, looking about him. "What do you mean, chains? What chains? Where chains?" He touched his watch-chain to satisfy himself that it was not yet lost. Then, somewhat sadly, he said "You're bleddywell right. I got nothing but my chain to lose. And what's that worth? Three pounds?”
― Gerald Kersh, The Thousand Deaths of Mr. Small

“So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan’s Answer.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain. It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism. By the time buyer's remorse hits, a new and more brutal political culture has arisen. A gaslit nation becomes engulfed in flames.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable.

[Scene fourteen. Translation by Desmond Vesey, 1960. ‘The present version is a translation of the complete text of the latest German edition, not a stage adaptation.’]”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“The mechanism of the heavens was clearer, the mechanism of their courts was still murky.

[Scene fourteen. English version by Charles Laughton.]”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark