#idle

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas. ↗

— Philip Kaufman

#entertainments #fun #ideas #idle #joy

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments. ↗

— Frank B. Kellogg

#armaments #back #building #competing #contrary

We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. ↗

— Eamon de Valera

#cannot #idleness #inefficiency #waste #we cannot

In the Constitution of the American Republic there was a deliberate and very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule. ↗

— Robert Welch

#american republic #constitution #deliberate #division #emphatic

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#time #freedom