Ian > Ian's Quotes

“Liberties aren't given, they are taken.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Life
The machine
The human soul
A 75mm breech
My portrait”
― Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems

“... You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.
”
― Ernesto Cardenal, Zero hour and other documentary poems

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“... It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness.”
― Ernesto Cardenal, Zero hour and other documentary poems

“LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE”
― Ernesto Cardenal, Zero hour and other documentary poems

“To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.

At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.”
― Blaise Cendrars

“We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“To call the population of strangers in the midst of which we live "society" is such a usurpation that even the sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like "colleague," "contact," "buddy," acquaintance," or "date." Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.”
― Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability

“One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.”
― John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

“Dichotomies are most mischevious when they arbitrarily separate parts of a highly interrelated and complex system.”
― David Ehrenfeld

“There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.”
― John Michael Greer

“It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.”
― Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge