“And in the darkness I smile at life, as if I were the possessor of charm which would enable me to transform all that is evil and tragical into serenity and happiness. But when I search my mind for the cause of this joy, I find there is no cause, and can only laugh at myself.”
“Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich is against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of vio¬lence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs . The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierce¬ness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its over¬burdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.”
“The falsehood of all the revolutions of history: they destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”
“Было, конечно, некоторое противоречие в том, что революционные лозунги и речовки вроде «Революция продолжается, значит нам ее продолжать» насаждались сверху донизу, от подворотен до Кремля, властными структурами – против которых и полагалось быть направленной любой революции”
“On the contrary, all experience shows that revolutionaries come from those who are economically independent, not from factory workers. Very few revolutionary leaders have done manual work, and those who did soon abandoned it for political activities. The factory worker wants higher wages and better conditions, not a revolution. It is the man on his own who wants to remake society, and moreover he can happily defy those in power without economic risk.”
“No one knew it then because it started, as revolutions often do, as something quiet and almost routine.”
“Freedom is a living concept, free in itself…”
“Well, it’s the story of the founding of a New Jersey town, and its citizens, and the American Revolution. With some singing and dancing and a turntable.”
“Oh, Oiseau, you want Independence, but that idea weighs you down like handcuffs. First, be free before the idea. Then: make a list of the things in your head and in your stomach that chain you up. That s where it starts, that struggle of yours...”
“شعبنا لا يثور أبدا وإذا ثار فسرعان ما يتخلى عن الثورة ، شعبنا ليس على استعداد لدفع ثمن الحرية”
“To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world.”
“We are our own asteroid. Our consumption of fossil fuels has released--is releasing--a store of carbon into the atmosphere that has been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years. Corals, plankton, predators: everything in the ocean is screaming at us to stop. If we don t listen and take action right now, we could be witnesses to the death of most life on earth. We will be the cause of that death... We will have erased ourselves in a blink of geologic time.”
“What you buy doesn t make you cool, it makes you the opposite. Stop buying stuff just to have more stuff. Most of us have enough of everything already. Let s care for what we ve got, instead, and dispose of our disposable society.”
“It ensured that I d never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites.”
“Specialists are the animals that remind us what an incredible fluke it is that our world exists at all; that the temperature is what it is, that the air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen. They remind us how much damage even the smallest changes to that system can cause and they show us how badly we re screwing things up.”
“No anti-slavery crusader aimed for a partial solution or settled on a regimen of interim targets. The fight to end slavery was a fight to end 100 percent of slavery for all time. In just that way, we can t settle for partial measures if we are going to win the war for our world. We need to fight for 100 percent sustainability, now.”
“The vision of the ideal life that we ve been taught in the West, which is gaining ever more purchase in China and India and elsewhere, feeds the system we need to undo. Go to school in order to get a degree in order to get a job in order to earn money so you can try to buy happiness because your life sucks, then retire and die: this is not meaningful living.”