We know our lands have now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we know that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.
There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented...The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.
Ernest BevinBritish labour leader, politician, and statesman1881 - 1951
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.
H. L. MenckenAmerican journalist and writer1880 - 1956
Excerpt from poem. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways (1798)
Any predicate we use to parse a particular focus will, in the course of the relentless, ineluctable process of transformation, entail its opposite as well.
Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall
Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation
Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall
Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation
I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick; I'm so mean I make medicine sick.
One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colours, that colour is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Carl SaganAmerican astrophysicist, cosmologist and author1934 - 1996
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.
Carl SaganAmerican astrophysicist, cosmologist and author1934 - 1996
Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.
The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health.
Ann RadcliffeEnglish author and pioneer of the Gothic novel1764 - 1823