Tamara > Tamara's Quotes

“A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So,”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“Then I reckon we got ourselves a good old-fashioned standoff."
...
Nobody moved, or said anything, for the next few moments.
"Old-fashioned standoffs are mighty borin”
― Derek Landy, The Faceless Ones

“Can I ask you a question? You know with vampires and werewolves and goblins and things, is there any mythological creature that doesn't actually exist?"
"Of course," he replied. "The unicorn and the leprechaun would be would be the two main ones. The Loch Ness Monster isn't real, either, that's just someone called Bert.”
― Derek Landy, Kingdom of the Wicked

“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

“Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

“I've had three children . . . And some man who's never felt . . . his baby crown is stronger than me? Is tougher than me?”
― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

“Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind ... when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal.”
― Friedrich Engels

“Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
― Slavoj Zizek

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
― Confucius

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“A sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'. He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Those who can't remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”
― Mark Fisher

“An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”
― George Mikes, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils

“Remember: If you go for a walk with a friend in England, don't say a single word for hours; if you go for a walk with your dog, talk to it all the time.”
― George Mikes, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils

“If a continental youth wants to declare his love to a girl, he kneels down, tells her that she is the sweetest, the most charming and ravishing person in the world, that she has something in her, something peculiar and individual which only a few hundred thousand other women have and that he would be unable to live one more minute without her. Often, to give a little more emphasis to the statement, he shoots himself on the spot. This is a normal, week-day declaration of love in the more temperamental continental countries. In England the boy pats his adored one on the back and says softly: ‘I don’t object to you, you know.’ If he is quite mad with passion, he may add: ‘I rather fancy you, in fact.”
― George Mikes, How to Be a Brit

“Mr S. got angry.
‘Yes, I do have a son. He’s a good-for-nothing. A dead loss.’
I couldn’t ask which prison he was in, so I put it more tactfully: ‘What is he doing?’
He sighed deeply: ‘He’s a professor of mathematics at London University.”
― George Mikes

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World