#natur

...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts. ↗

— Adam Leith Gollner

#fruit #megafauna #page- #nature

Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-regulated-regulated market. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#regulation #nature

...dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field... ↗

— John Geddes

#field #furrow-lines #grid #nature #orange-abacus

What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature? ↗

— Kevin Dutton

#nature

...at dawn, the grains of sleep turn to floating black spots, then out of focus the world tilts, and the cat scratches at the door... ↗

— John Geddes

#dawn #nature #poetry #sleep #the-world

My little friend Grildrig; you have made a most admirable panegyrick upon your country. You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator. That laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you, some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable; but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required towards the procurement of any one station among you...I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives, to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. ↗

— Jonathan Swift

#nature

These sociopaths,' he said. 'What do they feel like? Inside?' Isabel smiled. 'Unmoved,' she said. 'They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved. Cats are sociopaths, you see. It's their natural state. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#nature

I hear he liked flowers pretty well." "Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him." --"Out, Brief Candle ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#disappointment #flowers #friends #nature #nature

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison. ↗

— Pliny the Elder

#nature

Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. ↗

— Margaret Fuller

#nature