#it

North of the 49th parallel we value equality; south of it, they treasure freedom. ↗

— Michael Adams

#equality

Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer. ↗

— B.F. Skinner

#politics #science #design

To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see. ↗

— Anonymous

#god #hope #pleasing-to-god #faith

We designate the spirit of the well as 'she' because in most of her personifications she takes a female form, though not invariably. She appears in many guises - ghost, witch, saint, mermaid, fairy, and sometimes in animal form, often as a sacred fish - and her presence permeates well lore, and indeed water lore generally. ↗

— Colin Bord

#ghost #holy-well #holy-wells #mermaid #sacred-fish

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#saturation #sight #television #design

I just have more fun when I get to try new things - and the action film genre has kind of painted itself into a corner, copied itself so many times and it has basically run out of bad buys. ↗

— Bruce Willis

#action film #bad #basically #buys #copied

Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today. ↗

— Idries Shah

#big-picture #lack-of-knowledge #lack-of-perspective #rigidity #design

...if he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals. Not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design. ↗

— Benjamin Percy

#design

But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads. Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves. ↗

— T.H. White

#morality #understanding-oneself-and-others #youth #age

I have not been nourished by English Literature. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am... [I] set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#epic #greek #homer #myth #design