Boredom is immoral. All a man has to do is see. All about us nature puts on the most thrilling adventure stories ever created, but we have to use our eyes. I was walking across our compound last month when a queen termite began building her miraculous city. I saw it because I was looking down. One night three giant fruit bats flew over the face of the moon. I saw them because I was looking up. To some men the jungle is a tangled place of heat and danger. But, to the man who can see, its vines and plants form a beautiful and carefully ordered tapestry. No, I don’t want any bored men around me.

William Beebe

All speculation – all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living – must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.

Stephen Greenblatt – THE SWERVE – How the World Became Modern

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world.

Patti Smith – M Train

Oh what a life this is! Why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space?

Jack Kerouac – The Dharma Bums

I don’t like jails, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Charles Bukowski

I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Come, let us all be friends for once
Let us make life easy on us,
Let us be lovers and loved ones,
The earth shall be left to no one.

Yunus Emre, Turkish, 1240-1320(?)

I teach concerning mighty things,
And go right on to loose from round the mind
The tightened coils of dread Religion

 – Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Thus the city (Florence, 1497) was openly divided: in the public councils one faction fought against the other, and as happens in divided cities, no man took thought of the common good, so intent was he upon smashing his adversary’s reputation.

― Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy

Viejo los cerros, y aun todavia enverdecen. (The hills are old, but they still turn green.)

― Mexican saying

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.

― William James

Long live the world which is so very funny to live in! What meaning to the living world had that little box of decomposing flesh? None. How insignificant is man in the universe, how insignificant his worries, his wars, his struggles, his ambitions, his trying to outwit his competitors! What is left of the great Caesar? There would be one Rome just the same, Caesar or no Caesar. Perhaps it would not be on the river Tiber, but there would be one Rome. What will be left tomorrow of the dozen little Caesars of today who think that they can build up a new world and terrify mankind? What are all the wars and dictatorships and bolshevisms for if finally men always end up by doing what is best for them, great men or not? So then why not enjoy life, love, merriment? And if some day you cannot enjoy them any longer, die and be forgotten and leave no ghosts behind. That’s paradise.

– B. Traven, The Bridge in the Jungle

Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century’s most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.

– Susan Sontag, On Photography

A man has not only a right to express his thoughts, but it is his duty to do so.

Percy Byshe Shelly, Declaration of Rights

Racial prejudice has no place in this country.

The Lone Ranger, 1956

Watch a butterfly dance. Watch the fireflies dance. Watch the lights on the water dance. Let your heart dance with them.

― Yoko Ono, Twitter

Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, racism and capitalism.

― Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

In this regard, we do not need to explain away the subjective experience. We are what we experience ourselves to be. Our self-experience of intentions and “will” are not epiphenomenal illusions. They are what we should expect an evolutionlike process to feel like!

THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES
The co-evolution of language and the brain
Terrence W. Deacon

“Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

— Susan Sontag
On Photography