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But namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other

Habit is this the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

Destiny does not speak in slogans, but in cruelties.

Having come thus far in his speech, Ippolit Kirillovich, who had evidently chosen a strictly historical method of accounting, which is a favorite resort of all nervous orators who purposely seek a strict framework in order to restrain their own impatient zeal...

Having come thus far in his speech, Ippolit Kirillovich, who had evidently chosen a strictly historical method of accounting, which is a favorite resort of all nervous orators who purposely seek a strict framework in order to restrain their own impatient zeal...

Pops loved the Braeburns and the Galas, but the Honeycrisps were his favorites. Offer him a bland-ass Red Delicious and he’d look at you like you were talking bad about his mama.

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book- that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.

As usual he was content to be at home in his room or on his porch or patio. Early in his life he recognized that he was best when he was by himself. Though he hated to admit his preference. People were suspect of loners. They looked for weirdness, strange preferences and inclinations, anything to suggest sinister motives.

People get folded up in the creases of their lives.

Many times Sylvia thought that the people sitting around waiting for the zombies to attack ought to visit a jail sometime. That’s an apocalypse nobody knew what to do with.

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

Nixon believed- as he said many times- that if the president of the United States does it, it can’t be illegal. But Nixon never understood the much higher and meaner truth of Bob Dylan’s warning that “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

...or worse still any word of insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an insult, painfully irritated the wound, interrupting that necessary quiet in which they both tried to listen to the stern and dreadful choir that still resounded in their imagination...

The man who does not understand the construction of the machine cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which revolves quietly is one of the most essential parts of the machine, and not the shaving which merely harms and hinders the working.

In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.

the other, still more reasonably, says it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it;

“Another romantic lunacy. We assume that a personality problem can be liquidated merely through an understanding of it- as though a man could lift a mountain once he admitted it was heavy. No: recognition is not synonymous with solution. I fly toward freedom as a moth toward the candle, and nothing so insubstantial as Reason will turn me aside.”

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons.

The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only betrayed us three times in three years.

Anatole was not quick-witted, nor ready or eloquent in conversation, but he had the faculty, so invaluable in society of composure and imperturbable self-possession.

Fire, snakes & the moon,
says Auden, somewhere, are sacred to poets
& suchlike madmen. He may be right.
Dogs warm themselves by one, kill another,
howl at the third; & if anybody knows what’s sacred,
it’s a dog. After all, we’re their gods.

They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they- friends from childhood- had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over... But those tears were pleasant to them both.

“What man who has lived for more than a score of years desires justice, warrior? For my part, I find mercy infinitely more attractive. Give me a forgiving deity any day.”

In Marx’s view, justice is a “natural consequence” of “the relations of production.”

And it is perhaps significant that the longest-lasting workers’ cooperative that has survived- Mondragon, which was founded in Spain’s fascist period, in the Basque country, in 1956- did so in part because it set up its own credit institutions and marketing functions, thus casting its political strategy across all three circuits.