Quote's Quote's

A whole army of Polygons, who turned out to fight as private soldiers, was utterly annihilated by a superior force of Isosceles Triangles, the Squares and Pentagons meanwhile remaining neutral. Worse than all, some of the ablest Circles fell a prey to conjugal fury It is recorded that during that triennial agitation no less than twenty-three Circles perished in domestic discord.

The Agitation for the Universal Color Bill continued for three years; and up to the last moment of that period it seemed as though Anarchy were destined to triumph.

There would be others, of course, and other after others, but calling them by my name in a moment of passion would feel like a derived thrill, an affectation.

The sense of what they were saying became lost, and only the exercise remained. The exchange was conducted with the certainty of a measured hoedown and had the jerkiness of Monday's wash snapping in the wind-now cracking east, then west, with only the intent to whip the dampness out of the cloth.

Our ruling class knows one law: no change. Despotism! They know one rule: force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.

I am the eternal spectator, separated by unbridgeable gaps of knowledge, feeling the sperm gathering in tight nuts, the quivering rectums, smelling the iron reek of sex, sweat, and rectal mucus, watching the writhing brown bodies in the settings sun, torn with an ache of disembodied lust and the searing pain of disintegration. Silver spots boil in front of my eyes. I am standing in the empty ruined courtyard hundreds of years from now, a sad ghostly visitant in a dead city, smell of nothing and nobody there. The boys are flickering shadows of memory, evoking bodies that have long since turned to dust. I am calling, calling without a throat, without a tongue, calling across the centuries: Paco Joselito Enrique.

They [space pods] were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable.

.. the fact that Hal's builders had failed fully to understand the psychology of their own creation showed how difficult it might be to establish communication with truly alien beings.

"...Ah! Uncas, Uncas, your behavior was more like tat of a curious woman, than of a warrior on his scent!"

The fiercer element had cropped the verdure of the plain, which looked as though it were scathed by the consuming lightning. But, here and there, a dark green tuft rose in the midst of the desolation; the earliest fruits of a soil that had been fattened with human blood. The whole landscape, which, seen by a favoring light, and in a genial temperature, had been found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured allegory of life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest colours, and without the relief of any shadowing.

... he who wins by force has won but half the battle.

I experienced the very opposite of what the German and French metaphysicians of our century have assured us is the truth: that all that is other is hostile to the individual. To me all that is other seemed exquisite. Even that corpse, even the squealing rats. To be able to experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger adn nausea, was a miracle.

ZAPPA: Usually, I say, that the taking of drugs is a license to be an asshole, which is the same reason why people drink.

Gangel: How does Frank Zappa want to be remembered? Zappa: Ugh. Its not important. Gangel: Not important at all? Zappa: Uh-uh. Gangel: Want to be remembered for the music? Zappa: Its not important even to be remembered. I mean the people who worry about being remembered are guys like Reagan, Bush; these people want to be remembered and they'll spend a lot of money and do a lot of work to make sure that remembrance is just terrific. Gangel: And for Frank Zappa? Zappa: I don't care.

In her wide eyes, saturated with fear, he had seen his own aloneness turned inside out, rendered visible, worn upon the skin.

There are certain times and places and conditions when much of that [personal nature & genetics] can be swept away, that there are instances where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation.

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance the worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance.

But it was this area that fascinated me: how a man so divided against himself could nevertheless contribute more useful knowledge and craft to the world in what was functionally only half a life than the rest of us, who are presumably in mental good health, do in the whole of our more ordinary lives. ((about Lorenzo Langsroth, guy who invented modern bee hives))

The world underwater is the most foreign place I have ever visited. I'd seen pictures, of course, but pictures are static. Nothing had quite prepared me for the animality of this world or so challenged my notion of landscape. The rocks are animals. The trees are animals. The flowers are animals.

Any light we contrive is prodigal, merely the by product of heat. But fireflies and a lot of other animals make a heatless light simply by being alive.

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending the store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself lay under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness. This was the first time it happened, but after a while it got so common she ceased to be surprised. It was like a drug. In a way it was good because it reconciled her to things. She got so she received all things with the solidness of the earth which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

Whenever we say something just feels right or wrong we're evading the deeper, perhaps hidden, ideas that inform our feelings. But in those hidden places, we find what we really think if we have the courage to face our own naked truths

On October 15, 2013, workers unveiled a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot sign near a major roadway in Harrison, Arkansas, known in those parts as Klan terriroty. The same sign showed up on billboards overlooking major roadways from Alabama to Oregon. Passing drivers saw bold black letters against a yellow background: ANTI-RACIST IS A CODE WORD FOR ANTI-WHITE. Robert Whitaker, who ran for vice president of the United States in 2016 on the American Freedom Party's ticket, popularized this declaration in a 2006 piece called "The Mantra." This mantra has become scripture to the self-idenfified "swarm" of White supremacists who hate people of color and Jews and fear the "ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race," as Whitaker claimed. History tells a different story. Contrary to "the mantra," White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrious impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler's Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost - more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be - and still is - teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it's more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existance.

The rapidity with which one can completely change ones ideas and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarianism is wonderful. (Quoting Worsley)

And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

The wind comes on the next day, a whole gale out of the southwest, with driving snow filling the air and the tents quaking with its violence. They huddled in their sleeping bags, dismally uncomfortable but radiantly happy.

The sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

You don't have to be able to swim to know a fish, you don't have to shine to recognize a star.

About the time the sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strown with the bones of luckless wayfarers.

Life, said the stream of quick water down the rocks in the cold dark.

Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front of hungry people.

For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

In farm country,the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies too.

It is well that the planting season comes only in spring, for moderation is best in all things, even shovels.

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

To wish to do it is reason enough.

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. (accessed from Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, 205)

When a change occurs in one part of the circuit, many other parts must adjust themselves to it. Change does not necessarily obstruct the flow of energy; evolution is a long series of self-induced changes, the net result of which has been probably to accelerate the flow; certainly to lengthen the circuit. (accessed from Newton, Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, 205)

Life isn't about searching endlessly to find what's missing; its about learning to live with the missing parts.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe its worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if were surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow.

To Brother Librarian, whose task in life was the preservation of books, the principal reason for the existence of books was that they might be preserved perpetually. Usage was secondary, and to be avoided if it threatened longevity.

Before European arrival, forests covered nearly half of the country - around 1 billion acres. In the 250 years between 1600 and 1850 new settlers had deforested 173 million acres of the country. In the following half century almost twice that amount - an additional 323 million acres of forest - fell to the axe and saw. Barely 500 million acres of forest remained by 1909, when [Aldo] Leopold began his career as a forest ranger, and the cutting continued.

All civilization is basically dependant upon natural resources. All natural resources, except only subterranean minerals, are soil or derivatives of soil. Farms, ranges, crops, and livestock, forests, irrigation water, and even water power resolve themselves into questions of soil. Soil is therefore the basic natural resource. It follows that the destruction of soil is the most fundamental kind of economic loss which the human race can suffer. With enough time and money, a neglected farm can be put back on its feet - if the soil is still there. With enough patience and scientific knowledge, an overgrazed range can be restored - if the soil is still there. By expensive replanting and with a generation or two of waiting, a ruined forest can again be made productive - if the soil is still there. With infinitely expensive works, a ruined watershed may again fill our ditches or turn our mills - if the soil is still there. But if the soil is gone, the loss is absolute and irrevocable. Source: Erosion and Prosperity, AL, p. 188 Cited: Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, JLN, p.57

Before the plow the prairie comprised a diverse community of plant and animal species - grama and buffalo grasses, wire grass, bluestem grass, bunchgrass, sand grass and sand sage, brown snakeweed, yellow sunflowers, sundrops, poppy mallow, bee balm, jackrabbits, grasshoppers, mice, pocket gophers, coyotes and wolves, lesser prairie chickens, horned larks, and great white cranes, among hundreds and thousands of other species. All of these had been well adapted to the region's climatic extremes - its predictably unpredictable periods of dryness and high winds. In place of the prairie humans had created farms that grew little more than wheat, which was not particularly well adapted to the climate... Once destroyed, wheat left nothing behind that would hold down the soil - nothing to hold the earth together.

What was needed was a real shift of ideas, not merely a shift of seats. Conservation, Leopold urged, was more than a sum of physical acts of government. It was more than bureaus, laws, land purchases, road building, fire prevention, grazing permits, timber sales, and hunting regulations. Conservation required a deeper-sprung national philosophy toward land and the ways people used it.

Soil ... was not the just the medium that allowed plants to grow and thus animals to live; it was the foundational link in the entire web of life, the base of the fountain of energy that flowed through nature's system.

Ecological conservation was about using land in ways that promoted the flow of nutrients along the path of atom X.

In a letter to W.L. Anderson of the Soil Conservation Service, Leopold distilled out of his rich ecological understanding a set of critical recommendations for land use goals: 1. it is desirable to maintain the largest possible variety of plants and animals on the farm, 2. variety in animals automatically follows from variety in plants, that is, food and cover, 3. a very small area devoted to food and cover produces astonishing gains in the diversity of animal life. (From AL letter to WL Anderson, 21 May 1940)

Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of use do not euthanize out own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sweage. Instead, the delegation of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on.

Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

Even then, since the sea otter needs to maintain a very high metabolism to keep its inner furnaces hot, it eats up to 25 percent of its body weight daily - diving for bottom-dwelling mollusks such as clams, mussels, abalone, and creatures like sea urchins and octopus. It pries these off the rocks, stuffs them into an armpit pouch of skin along where it also carries a rock, swims to the surface, and lies floating on its back, where it can eat in repose, pounding open the hard shells with its rock, using its belly as a king of table. Sea otters gather in large groups of one hundred or more called "rafts," where they float together amid kelp beds and ocean swells and groom and fluff their fur meticulously to maintain its insulating properties. A mother sea otter nurses her baby pups while they rest on her belly, and when she dives for food, she wraps them in strands of kelp so they don't drift away in her absence.

If you could have looked into my very heart that when I want to laugh; if you could have done so when the laugh arrived; if you could do so now, when King Laugh have pack up his crown and all that is to him - for he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time - maybe you would perhaps pity me the most of all.

The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time;

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

It is surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported tither from the country's hills.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet scented-herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true Harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and Indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what how when where? There was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight.

Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation.

Faith is believing what you know ain't so.

We are speaking of the collective white mans historical record. We are speaking of the collective white mans cruelties, and evils, and greeds, that have seen him act like a devil toward the non-white man. Any intelligent, honest, objective person cannot fail to realize that this white mans slave trade, and his subsequent devilish actions are directly responsible for not only the presence of this black man in America, but also for the condition in which we find this black man here.

I've had enough of someone else's propaganda, I had written to these friends. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are proving that they are with us. But the hard truth is this isn't helping to solve Americas racist problem. The Negroes aren't the racists. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their proving of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where Americas racism really is-and that's in their own home communities; Americas racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.