#top

As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead. ↗

— Penn Jillette

#politics #sex #utopia #money

Mr. Galliano wore his big top-hat very much on one side of his head, so much so that Jimmy really wondered why it didn't fall off. ‘When Galliano wears his hat on one side the circus is taking lots of money,’ said Lotta to him. ‘But when you see him wearing it straight up, then you know things are going badly. He gets into a bad temper then, and I hide under the caravan when I see him coming. I've never seen his hat so much on one side before!’ Jimmy thought that circus ways were very extraordinary. Even hats seemed to share in the excitement! ↗

— Enid Blyton

#excitement #hats #top-hat #money

Get rid of the idea that to own money or to be associated with it is "dirty" or "greedy" or "non-spiritual. ↗

— Christopher Dines

#christopher-dines-quotes #money

You pays your money and you takes your choice. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#science-fiction #money

This world is better than Utopia because - and follow this point carefully - you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That's the very definition of Utopia. ↗

— Brad Warner

#utopia #movies

I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#beach #california #groves #libraries #library

Musical myths speak with authority about our society, its fragility, its strengths, its desires, and its limits. Music becomes a wise version of the utopian messenger, pleasing us with his account of an ideal land but also warning us, in his tones, of all the dangers. ↗

— Edward Rothstein

#utopia #music

It’s more eerie to be alone in a city that’s lit up and functioning than one that’s a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards. ↗

— Isaac Marion

#dystopia #nature

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#nature

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272) ↗

— Victor Davis Hanson

#economics #income-disparity #inequality #military-history #progressivism