Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.”
― Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County

“Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. ”
― Arthur Koestler

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”
― Steve Martin

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.”
― John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead

“What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species.”
― Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations

“The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress.”
― Bill Hicks

“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography

“You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.”
― Stephen King, Guns

“The movement toward equality still has a long way to go, especially in a world in which the poorest, and particularly the poorest in the poorest countries, are preparing to be subjected, with increasing violence, to climatic and environmental damage caused by the richest people’s way of life.”
― Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality

“The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one's immediate actual circumstances. It is now a given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human scale communication or exploration of ideas.”
― Jonathon Crary

“One of the many reasons human cultures have long associated sleep with death is that they each demonstrate the continuity of the world in our absence.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Sumner’s mind keeping the peace abroad was connected with freeing the slaves at home. Repeatedly he tried to convince Lincoln that by issuing an emancipation proclamation he could kill Confederate chances of recognition in Europe.”
― David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man

“these people of millennia past were not like us but with more dirt. Their beliefs were different, their prayers were different, their faith was different, their very thoughts were different, and yet we still live within their long shadows.”
― Ed Simon, Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain