All posts in Quotes

The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing. - David Cain

I can’t think of any more human activity than conducting science experiments. Think about it — what do kids do? … They’re turning over rocks, they’re plucking petals off a rose — they’re exploring their environment through experimentation. That’s what we do as human beings, and we do that more thoroughly and better than any other species on Earth that we have yet encountered… We explore our environment more than we are compelled to utter poetry when we’re toddlers — we start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist. And so when I think of science, I think of a truly human activity — something fundamental to our DNA, something that drives curiosity. - Neil deGrasse Tyson

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. -Banksy

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. - Albert Camus

...there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction across the plain. - J. Donald Fernie

'I gather, collate, re-use, layer, peel, burn, reveal, locate, question, duplicate, play and photograph.' - Kate MccGwire

How would you define life? Is it when a system reproduces itself? If that is the case, plenty of computer programs could be called alive, while plenty of people--sterile men and women, for example, or nuns--could not. Things that are alive consume fuel, move around, and excrete waste products, but so do automobiles, and no one would call them alive. - Michael Brooks

A psychology major, for instance, learns about the field of psychology—its history, the variety of techniques, the manner in which research is done and written up—without any expectation of developing something markedly new and different by the time they graduate, or ever. The psychology student, in other words, is trained to fit into the field, to be competent. Art students, in contrast, may receive a certain level of technical training—how to draw the human figure, how to cast bronze, how to render a design on the computer. But they are expected to produce something that is original almost from their first class. -Daniel Grant