#lis

Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it's part of him, and it's like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn't doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he's bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn't successful he's big with his property. That is so.' 'But let a man get property he doesn't see, or can't take time to get his fingers in, or can't be there to walk on it - why, then the property is the man. He can't do what he wants, he can't think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big - and he's the servant of his property. That is so, too. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#ownership #funny

When learning English as a second language, be sure to garble small words out of order in incomplete sentences. Then you'll have achieved the proficiency of a native speaker. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #grammar #humor #funny

I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people. ↗

— Scott Westerfeld

#funny #humor #parasites #vampires #zombies

Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. Far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism tend fatally towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrators, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#imagination

That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#procrastination #procrastination

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view. ↗

— Edward O. Wilson

#activism

A good zoo," Stella said, "is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don't hurt." She pauses, considering her words. "A good zoo is how humans make amends. ↗

— Katherine Applegate

#environmentalism

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want. ↗

— Lyanda Lynn Haupt

#materialism #environmentalism

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#hayduke #tree-farming #nature

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies. ↗

— Andy Couturier

#environmentalism #green #japan #sustainability #japan