Gregor Smith > Gregor's Quotes

“Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more choose the empire.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of life.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In any artistic rendering of the city theme alienation is a constant. Given the anonymity the city provides, it could hardly be otherwise. Artists, especially writers, have recognised this dichotomy, and that cities have always proved a source of freedom by providing anonymity, notwithstanding the estrangement and isolation that goes with it. Indeed, the city's impetus towards modernity is to be found in that narrow zone between loss of community and discovery of self.”
― Robert Drewe, The Penguin Book Of The City

“Such a suspicion of metanarratives was evident in the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe Project which had promised much, based on modernist stories of emancipation, progress, and reason, and had failed. At a grander level it can be seen in many post-WW2 responses to the failures of science (the atom bomb, the green revolution), Marxist political movements (the Soviet Union, China), or capitalism (the free market, development). Grand claims for "reason" and "rationality" had often led to horrendous consequences.”
― Tim Cresswell, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction

“This town breathes in all the universes that people in this city have in their heads”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Newlywed

“In Iowa the land is flat and the people are fat. Like petrol-driven bowling balls they roll across the plains, occasionaly slotting into the groove of a roadway, then rattling to a halt at fast-food joints where they are served with paper cups of 7 Up or Coke the size of oil drums, haystack hamburgers and stooks of fries.”
― Will Self, Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place

“To travel from place to place is to travel through time, and in every place the quality of time is different. Here, now it seemed to stretch in all directions. And I felt I understood why the Prophet Muhammad had ordained the observance of prayer five times a day' to act as markers for the faithful to lead them through the desert of eternity.”
― Peregrine Hodson

“As we talked I felt as if i had passed through an invisible barrier into another dimension governed by fundamentally different laws where the world that i had previously known had only marginal significance. Here, a man's body was a shadow, death was a process of life and the only truth was the mystery of God's purpose.”
― Peregrine Hodson, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan

“One thing the Shuravi do not understand, cannot understand, is our religion. A man who believes in God is stronger than a man who has no religion. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now the Shuravi will grow tired of the war, like the American people tired of the war in Vietnam. Communism began a hundred years ago and already it is old and confused. But God is eternal. Perhaps now you understand, Abdul Baz, why this jehad can only end in victory.”
― Peregrine Hodson, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan

“What do the Soviet pilots think as they press the fire control button? is there the same absense of emotion which I seek as i press the button of my camera? Do we both, for an instant, lose our humanity in machines?”
― Peregrine Hodson, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan

“About thirty of us settled down to sleep on the trestle branches of the chaikhane but my mind refused to let go of the day's images and i got up and walked along the street till I came to some shepherds gathered around a fire, their shadows dancing on an adobe wall and a chestnut tree. I did not approach them, but stood outside the ring of firelight and looked at them. Just so, I had glimpsed the life of the people but I was very little closer to knowing what it was to be one of them. Their past, present and future were contained in the fields and orchards, the streets and the bazaar of Nahrin. My time was different and in another place.”
― Peregrine Hodson, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan

“One thing is certain, we all translate our own ideas of happiness into form. It happens when you buy a car. It happens when a CEO contemplates the form of a new skyscraper headquarters, or when a master architect lays out a grand scheme for social housing. It happens when planners, politicians and community boards wrestle over roads, planning regulations and monuments. It is impossible to seperate the life and design of a city from the attempt to understand happiness, to experience it, and to build it for society. The search shapes cities, and cities shape the search in return.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“As we travelled from village to village, through the valleys with their bright streams, fields of golden maize and orchards of apricot trees it was impossible to imagine that one had stumbled into a wild garden of Eden whose people were miraculously preserved from the vileness of the twentieth century. Staying in a village for any length of time, one was drawn into another world of slow and subtle change, measurably by the colours of the corn and the height of the river, the rising of the sun and setting of the moon; a different universe whose inhabitants welcomed us with fear and kindness. But gradually the poverty, the primitive conditions and the drab monotony of an existence with nothing but the basic necessities had become oppresive. I felt like a traveller from the future, imprisoned in a present that was also the past remembered from a previous life.”
― Peregrine Hodson, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan

“What could any oyster want to climb a hill for? To climb a hill must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster. The most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to look at the scenery. Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an oyster, it seems plain that he does not care for scenery. An oyster has no taste for such things; he cares nothing for the beautiful. An oyster is of a retiring disposition, and not lively - not even cheerful above the average, and never enterprising.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“Grey lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided in and out among the rocks or lay still and sunned themselves. Where prosperity has reigned, and fallen; where glory has flamed, and gone out; where beauty has dwelt, and passed away; where gladness was, and sorrow is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high places, there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human vanity. His coat is the colour of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came to nought, of loves that are buried. If he could speak, he would say, Build temples: I will lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I will inhabit them; erect empires: I will inherit them; bury your beautiful: I will watch the worms at their work; and you, who stand here and moralise over me: I will crawl over your corpse at the last.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“The new political integration might well have doomed Scotland to the status of an English economic satellite: a supplier of foods, raw materials and cheap labour for the more sophisticated southern economy but with little possibility of achieving manufacturing growth and diversification in her own right...Union could well have been the political prelude to 'the development of underdevelopment' rather than the catalyst for a new age or progress and prosperity.”
― T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700 - 2000

“We dont even know their names anymore. The average person knows the name of less than a dozen plants, and this includes such categories as 'Christmas Tree'. Losing their names is a step in losing respect.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“But he found that a traveller's life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein