[quotes] Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015

 

"But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white."

"that this is your county, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it"

"the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker"

"Fear fueled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets."

"Why are only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in special need of this morality."

"My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed." 

"... some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own..."

"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own." 

"They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental 'firsts' - first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit."

"Things I believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another."

"... and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts."

"... and allow the citizens of this county to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them."

"The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs."

"No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice as much."

"Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen."

"This is the foundation of the Dream - its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works."

"The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact."

[quotes] A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin 1996

 

"'A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.'"

"'You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean that tin is useless.'" 

[quotes] Looking for Alaska - John Green 2005

 

"I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails."

"'You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.'"

"What is the most important question human beings must answer? Choose your question wisely, and then examine how Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity attempt to answer it."

"... but I wanted to trust her, and so I did."

"She said it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food."

"So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action."

"I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God."

"... we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."

"We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken."

[quotes] All My Sons - Arthur Miller 1947

 

"I don't know, everybody's gettin' so Goddam educated in this country there'll be nobody to take away the garbage. It's gettin' so the only dumb ones left are the bosses."

"It's a tragedy: you stand n the street today and spit, you're gonna hit a college man."

"And now I live in the usual darkness; I can't find myself; it's even hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be."

"The cats in that alley are practical, the bums who ran away when we were fighting were practical. Only the dead ones weren't practical. But now I'm practical, and I spit on myself."

"We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him! That's the principle; the only one we live by - it just happened to kill a few people this time, that's all. The world's that way, how can I take it out on him? What sense does that make? This is a zoo, a zoo!"

"I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better .I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father."

"You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's why he died."

[quotes] Our Common Future - World Commission on Environment and Development

"In essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations."

"The economic difficulties of sub-Saharan countries have had devastating social impacts. Declining per capita food production has contributed to growing undernourishment."

"Greatly increased external financing for development must be accompanied by policy changes that recognize the need to avoid environmental degradation."

"Latin American natural resources are being used not for development or to raise living standards, but to meet the financial requirements of industrialized country creditors."

"These countries are turning the terms of trade against themselves, earning less while exporting more. The promotion of increased volumes of commodity exports has led to cases of unsustainable overuse of the natural resource base."

"Policymakers must realize that spending on population activities and on other efforts to raise human potential is crucial to a nation's economic and productive activities and to achieving sustainable human progress - the end for which a government exists."

"Women farmers, through they play a critical role in food production, are often ignored by programmes meant to improve production."

"Thus when countries with untapped agricultural resources provide food by importing more, they are effectively importing unemployment."

"Food strategies must take into account all the policies that bear upon the threefold challenge of shifting production to where it is most needed, of securing the livelihoods of the rural poor, and of conserving resources."

[quotes] Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand 1957

 

"'Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?'"

"The passengers paid no attention; one more heat of steel being poured was not an event they had been taught to notice."

"He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification."

"He could not condemn without understanding; and he could not understand."

"His life had been a summary of the lives of all the men whose reward is a monument in a public park a hundred years after the time when a reward can matter - except that Richard Halley did not die soon enough."

"'Men have to get together and find a way out. But who's to decide which way to take, unless it's the majority? I guess that's the only fair method of deciding, I don't see any other. I suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain. The right's on their side. Men have to get together."

"This, she knew, was a tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatest, knowing that it is understood."

"'It seems to me that there are other things in the world.'
'Let others think about them'"

"'I've hired you to do a job, not to do your best - whatever that is.'"

"She sat, watching him in the manner of a scientist: assuming nothing, discarding emotion, seeking only to observe and to understand."

"'Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"Their work was done. For the moment, there was no future. They had earned the present."

"She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course - not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know."

"'Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.'"

"'You wouldn't understand it - would you? - if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy - to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists.'"

"'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'"

"'So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.'"

"She had ordered him out of her office, and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness."

"'But there is no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.'"

"'Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and effort.'"

"'Americans were the first to to understand that wealth is to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.'"

"'If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.'"

"'By what standard of value do you judge your days?'"

"'A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.'"

"'If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders - what would you tell him to do? [...] to shrug.'"

"'All business is just dirty politics and all politics is just dirty business.'"

"'I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.'"

"'Nobody should be allowed to waste money on the new until everybody has plenty of the old.'"

"'If we teach a man that it's evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it - we'll be able to do whatever we please with him.He won't defend himself. He won't feel he's worth it. He won't fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He's the man who'll beat us.'"

"'Is only evil real and possible?'"

"He had no desire to be a martyr for the sake of allowing people safely to indulge in their own irresponsible evil."

"'It was out own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world - but we let our enemies write its moral code.'"

"...was this to be the final sum: an end lower than the beginning?"

"...they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job - only louse men who don't care to do it."

"...and had known that the work of achieving one's happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life."

"'Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable - except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come [...] This is the strike of the men of the mind"

"'It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don't, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its saints, but by the grace of its sinners.'"

"'He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice.'"

"She thought, in bitter compassion, of how much he had failed to see. And I? - she thought."

"...she had now experienced it in both roles and knew that no action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice."

"...nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear."

"They seemed to be waiting to be told what to think."

"...he knew that the words they were eager to absorb and believe were the chains slipping in to hold them, like the goats, securely within the range of those funnels."

"'If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes - let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine.'"

"'It was I who kept our love hidden as a guilty secret - they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal.'"

"If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to lean."

"'Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?'"

"...each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth."

"They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for the lack of a safety pin."

"They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality."

"'This age of misery is God's punishment to man for the sin of relying on his mind!'"

"...the men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are - that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People's State of India."

"...that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks, a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought , the thought of the man who devised the levers."

"...that the justice that would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil."

"'and men can't live... if rotten bastards... like the ones in Washington... get away with things like... like the ones they're doing tonight... if everything becomes a stinking fake... men can't live that way"

"'An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living."

"'No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.'"

"'His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it.'"

"'Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.'"

"'For centuries the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt'"

"'In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.'"

"...a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading."

[quotes] The Discovery of Global Warming - Spencer R. Weart 2003

 

"Keeling's work was one example of how geophysics research often rested on love of the true world itself."

"The aim was to bind peoples together with interests that transcended the self-serving nationalism that had brought so much horror and death."

"It deserves to be remembered if there is a nugget of value amid the inevitable confusion."

"The 1965 Boulder conference was only one of many occasions when specialists began to interact more closely, drawing on one another's findings or, equally valuable, challenging them."

"People no longer imagined the climate was permanently stable. It was not the weight of any single piece of evidence that convinced them, but the accumulation of evidence from different, independent fields."

"'We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.'"

"A scientific finding cannot flourish in isolation; it needs support from other findings."

"But the simple is not always obvious unless someone points it out."

"Whenever there is evidence that something needs to be done, those who stand to profit from the doing will be especially quick to accept the evidence and argue for policy changes."

"Independent of nationalities, they wielded increasing power by claiming dominion over facts about the actual state of the world - thus shaping perceptions of reality itself."

"The better journalists noted that any one of these incidents might have had nothing to do with global warming. Yet the incidents did reflect disturbing statistical trends."

"Diplomacy is a gradual process. The first and most important work is to shift attitudes step by step."

"'Up until now many scientists may have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possibilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in an attempt to appear moderate and 'responsible' (that is, to avoid scaring people).'"

"Yet the central question had found its answer, an evaluation of danger far more precise than what people will act on when faced with an economic crisis of a foreign threat."

"In the IPCC reports, scientists gave their best answer. Now the main question is what people will choose to do."

"To say that such steps are socially or politically impossible is to forget that far greater changes have come swiftly, in countless areas, one people set their minds to change."

"But in the twenty-first century, in many areas the alternative to government action is not individual liberty; it is corporate power."