Latest Quotes

“The most damaging myth in American politics is that the presidency can fix our problems. It's a myth backed by a media machine that finds it convenient to frame American politics as a grand drama in which the president is the lead actor. It's a myth fed by every episode of the West Wing in which Pre…”

— Ezra Klein, vox.com

“When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the 'meaning' of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.”

— E.M Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

“Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address was 275 words long. Two hundred of those words were one syllable. I want to declare that Abraham Lincoln English is the official language of the Procter & Gamble Co., and I want to encourage that kind of simplicity… I think maybe 80% of the memos we write at P&G…”

— Tom Laco, Soap Opera: The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble

“Let us shut our eyes to what exists. A house: a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life. A room: a surface over which one can walk at ease, a bed on which to stretch your…”

— Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

“We are to be pitied for living in unworthy houses, since they ruin our health and our morale. It is our lot to have become sedentary creatures; our houses gnaw at us in our sluggishness, like a consumption. We shall soon need far too many sanatoriums. We are to be pitied. Our houses disgust us; we f…”

— Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

“The gardens that have graced this mortal Eden of ours are the best evidence of humanity's reason for being on Earth. Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must…”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

“If we recognize the plant as an autonomous power which enters in order to put roots and flowers in us, then we distance ourselves by several degrees from the skewed perspective which imagines that spirit (Geist) is the monopoly of human beings and doesn't exist outside of them. A new world-picture h…”

— Ernst Jünger, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere

“What sustains us, if not the mysterious ray of light which sometimes flashes through the inner wilderness? People wish to speak, however imperfectly, of that which to them is more than human.”

— Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios

“The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That's the honest position, given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the…”

— Terence McKenna, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere

“Hailed by the whole, one can become healed through ecodelic practice precisely because the subject turns back on who they thought they were, becoming aware of the existence of a whole, a system in which everything 'really is' connected—the noösphere. Such a vision can be discouraging and even fright…”

— Richard M. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere

“You poor baby! And yet—you selfish little bastard! As I try to find the agent behind the act, the motivating force at the bottom of the whole thing, I seem to see only an endless ambivalence. Behind the mask of love I find my innate selfishness. What a predicament I am in if someone asks, 'Do you re…”

— Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

“Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.”

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

“The world is filled with Knowledge; it is almost empty of Understanding. For, let me tell you, Knowledge is of the head, Understanding is of the heart. Knowledge is of the intellect, Understanding is of instinct.”

— Louis H Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats And Other Writings

“I have sought with all due insistence to impress upon you, as a maxim, the simple truth that the heart is greater, worthier, nobler, finer than the head: that the heart is the sanctuary of the Temple of Man, the head its portal. That from the heart comes forth Sympathy into the open: the subtlest, t…”

— Louis H Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats And Other Writings

“Wright holds that the city will inevitably decay and disappear because he imagines electrification and physical mobility as the dynamic factors in contemporary history, sweeping and carrying all before them.”

— Morton Gabriel White, The Intellectual Versus The City: From Thomas Jefferson To Frank Lloyd Wright

“I walk away, hailing a taxi, and heading toward Hubert's in it I hallucinate the buildings into mountains, into volcanoes, the streets become jungles, the sky freezes into a backdrop, and before stepping out of the cab I have to cross my eyes in order to clear my vision. Lunch at Hubert's becomes a…”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Patrick Bateman , American Psycho

“Disdaining the wasteful, elitist space where bands hankered after record-company expense accounts that would pay for hookers and villas in the South of France, Silicon Valley presented itself as the tribune of average-Joe air guitarists who never got their shot at the American Dream. It was easy to…”

— David Samuels, n+1

“So God has never been made. He has always been. Then slowly, with the increase of consciousness, when people discovered that they could make different ideas about the deity, they came to the conclusion that it was nothing but an idea, and they quite forgot the real phenomenon that is behind all the…”

— Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939

“Quartz is a business-news site owned by Atlantic Media and edited by Kevin Delaney, a former managing editor at The Wall Street Journal. It operates a mobile optimized website, rather than native apps, and drives audience growth through daily email newsletters.”

— The New York Times, The New York Times Innovation Report

“It even crossed his mind, as he stood idly waiting, his hand resting on the wallpaper books, that maybe he ought to get a rifle. Why not? His father had taken him hunting as a boy; the memory rose in his mind with wonderful vividness— creeks, trees, sunlight, squirrels scampering along high, leafy b…”

— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts