[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."

[quotes] Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild 2016

 

"We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the "other" side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it's on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin."

"Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt."

"An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances."

"But shame didn't stop those who disapproved of public services from using them."

"'Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.'"

"He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn't want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for."

"For the Arenos, religious faith has moved into the very cultural space in which politics might have played a vital, independent role. Politics hand't helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had."

"The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left."

"I think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top."

"I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to - to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. Bu there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic communities around the 'self regulated' plants."

"Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be "above consumerism," to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony - even though they often depended on the parental money they were 'above' - so too Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, 'I'm above the government and all its services' to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them."

"Liberals were telling Americans to 'feel sorry' for recipients, but those were coastal urban liberals trying to impose their feeling rules on older Southern and Midwestern Christian whites."

"This offers a much desired private sector social world - one party based on a different worship: work."

"Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person's moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength."

"Fox gives Madonna and others the news. It suggests what the issues are. It tells her what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about."

"It's scary to look back; there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well."

"Liberals are saying your ideas are outmoded, sexist, homophobic, but it's not clear what their values are."

"If you can no longer feel pride in the United States through its president, you'll have to feel American in some new way - by banding with others who feel as strangers in their own land."

"You are strangers in your own land. You do no recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel - and feel seen as - moving forward. But trough no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward."

"racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom."

"Meanwhile, the nearly all-male ares of life - the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs - needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood."

"All these social movements left one group standing in line: the older, white male, especially if such a man worked in a field that didn't particularly help the planet. He was - or was soon becoming - a minority too."

"On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture of victimization had crept in."

"Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts should stop. The richer around the nation will become free of the poorer. They will secede."

"Such scapegoating reinforces the joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the 'bad one' helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the 'good ones,' the majority, no longer strangers in their own land."

"'The major fault line in American politics,' Reich predicts, 'will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.' The line will divide those who 'see the game as rigged and those who don't'."

[quotes] I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou 1969

 

"It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or leaning."

"Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood."

"but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confirmed to their roles."

"It was simply a small pattern in the grand design of our lives. If other children didn't move so much, it just went to show that our lives were fated to be different from everyone else's in the world."

"I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me."

"That was a totally new idea to me, and I would need time to think about it."

"She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations."

"For a few seconds it was a tossup over whether I would laugh (imagine being named Hallelujah) or cry (imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience)."

"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."

"Anyone I reckoned, sufficiently afraid or sufficiently dull could be polite. But to be able to operate at a top level with both adults and children was admirable."

"so which concrete angel glued to what country seat had decided that if my brother wanted to become a lawyer he had to first pay penance for his skin"

"We were maids and farmers, handymen and washer-women, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."

"As a species, we were an abomination. All of us."

"'I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty of give me death."

"'Annie, my policy is I'd rather stick my hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's.'"

"When the spell wore off he asked Uncle Willie what colored people had done to white people in the first place."

"Through food we learned that there were other people in the world."

"Each day she faced us with a clean slate and acted as if ours were clean as well."

"Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective."

"With the optimism of ignorance I thought that the morning was bound to bring a more pleasant solution."

"I reasoned that I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss."

"But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind."

"'That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, "Can't Do is like Don't Care." Neither of them have a home.'"

"I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer."

"Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of."

"Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with superior forces of maturity."

"But it's mean to watch someone enjoy something and not show your understanding of their enjoyment."

[quotes] Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs 2011

 

Great quick read. Recommended to me by my 12-year old cousin. She didn't let me mark the book so I didn't get a lot of quotes out.

"He had been through hell and had a right to his secrets. I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life, considering the price he'd paid for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve."

[quotes] Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut 1963

 

"I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon."

"Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either."

"'There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.'"

"'New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.'"

"'I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.'"

"As the driver talked to the salesman I wandered among the monuments - blank monuments, monuments in memory of nothing so far."

"'The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!'"

"I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise."

"'People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.'"

"'It is not possible to make a mistake,' she assured me. I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person."

"'I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.'"

"And I found it impossible not to lean on God. I had never needed such support before, and so had never believed that such support was available."

"So good and evil had to remain separate; good in the jungle, and evil in the palace. Whatever entertainment there was in that was about all we had to give the people."

"The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did."

[quotes] American Gods - Neil Gaiman 2001

 

"I was used to telling stores that people liked, or that they didn't read. I'd never written anything divisive before. But with this book, people either loved it, or they hated it."

"One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands [...] When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said 'They're scared to pass the ocean, it's too far,' pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America." - Richard Dorson

"He did not awake in prison with a feeling of dread; he was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it."

"Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit."

"The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later."

"Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual."

"Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all."

"Their priests died without passing on their secrets."

"She told them all these things, and they believed, because she believed."

"'Lady Liberty,' said Wednesday. 'Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner.'"

"'This is the only country in the world [...] that worries about what it is [...] The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.'"

"All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted."

"I feel sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull [...] for they'll talk about the odd, but they won't talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it's true or not."

"Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances."

"Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world [...] It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat."

"If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories."

"'Which way would you walk - the way of the hard truths or the way of fine lies?'"

"We do not remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness."

"God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city [...] someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs over all opposition."

"Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world."

"'You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we're the ones who get sick.'"

"'But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it."

"He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or it if was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough."

[quotes] Ready Player One - Ernest Cline 2011

 

"It was a partnership destined to alter the course of human history."

"As the era of cheap, abundant energy drew to a close, poverty and unrest began to spread like a virus."

"Even in the throes of an ongoing economic recession, the OASIS allowed Americans to continue engaging in their favorite pastime: shopping."

"'It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,' he wrote. 'A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.'"

"I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal." - Groucho Marx

"Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself."

"'No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.'"

"A thick film of neglect still covered everything in sight. The streets, the buildings, the people."

[quotes] Chocolat - Joanne Harris 1999

 

"With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time."

"I dared not acknowledge him, as if by so doing I should be obliged to admit a responsibility of which silence might absolve me."

"I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago [...] I envy the table's calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs."

"'Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.'"

"Small comforts in defiance of the dark."

[quotes] The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert 2014

 

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul"
- Alexander Pope

"In fact, the American mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it."

"At the heart of Darwin's theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is 'the denial of humanity's special status.'"

"Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible."

"'It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct.'"

"Virtually every species that's around today can be said to be cold-adapted."

"Lovejoy is the rare sort of person who seems equally comfortable slogging through the forest and testifying in front of Congress."

"Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants."

"What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, [Quammen] observes, 'is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.'"

"For the same reasons that local diversity has, as a general rule, been increasing, global diversity - the total number of different species that can be found worldwide - has dropped."

"Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did."

"When he finally came around to the idea that Neanderthals bequeathed some of their genes to modern humans, he told me, 'I thought it was very cool. It means that they are not totally extinct - that they live on a little bit in us.'"

"'It's only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, madness there.'"

"With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it."

"in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results."

"in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

"Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathway will remain open and which will be forever closed."