It does not seem like a prison until you try to break out

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Rosa Luxemburg

Beyond Big Brother

Whenever people think of Orwell today they usually think also of security cameras and ‘Big Brother’. Orwell represents much more than that. He saw that language and writing can be perverted to deceive people rather than inform them. If we remember that single lesson then his legacy will remain secure.

Nick Bardsley (“Orwell is funny“)

Resist Futilism

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Marshall McLuhan

Rat Race

People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven’t got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

Peter Ustinov

Web 6.66

No machine can replace the human spark: spirit, compassion, love and understanding.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr. 

Obfuscation

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

George Orwell (“Politics and the English Language“)

We and our Eurasian allies have always been at war with Eurasia.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Kurt Vonnegut

In the Ghetto

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Michael Harrington

Sea Pirates

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut

Ned Flanders

I want to be a scary hairy smelly man crying out in the wilderness like John the Baptist. I don’t want be Ned Flanders.

Stuart Delony

True Culture

I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.

William Ellery Channing

True Equality

I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves. Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions.

William Ellery Channing

Dare & Encourage

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The means sanctify the end.

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein

Laughing all the way to the cemetary

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.

George W. Bush (spoken at a Washington Dinner, March 2001)

Love & Power

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.

Jimi Hendrix

Not one penny

The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half, and enjoyed myself — the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.

Charles Darwin (to Emma Darwin, April, 1858)

Trapped in Spectacle

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau

A birds is no small thing.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

Henry David Thoreau

Don’t cheat yourself

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Henry David Thoreau