Photography and Beyond
"The journey is the destination"
-Dan Eldon
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
-Mark Twain
"To walk nude between two trenches, to make each side hesitate for fear of killing one of their own... because what one kills in war is not men, but uniforms"
-Abel Gance quoted in WW1 book "Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning" by Jay Winter
"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, THIS is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
-Socrates
“Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy.”
-Aristotle
"The pessimist might be right in the long run but - the optimist has more fun on the trip"
"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours."
-Cesar Chavez
"No-one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically devoted to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
-Robert M. Pirsig
"Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?"
-Feodor Dostoyevsky
"It’s not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real dynamic force in social evolution."
-Robert M. Pirsig (Lila, 1991)
"Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
QUOTATIONS
Americans, aware of the nature of their law, compare democracy to an awkward raft on which everyone paddles in a different direction. There is much hubbub and mutual abuse, and it is difficult to get everyone to pull together. In comparison to such a raft, the trireme of the totalitarian state, speeding ahead with outspread oars, appears indomitable. But on occasion, the totalitarian ship crashes on rocks an awkward raft can sail over.”
–Czeslaw Milosz “The Captive Mind”
"Those who see the potentialities of human nature as extending far beyond what is currently manifested have a social vision quite different from those who see human beings as tragically limited creatures whose selfish and dangerous impulses can be contained only by social contrivances which themselves produce unhappy side effects."
-Thomas Sowell
“If the intellectual must know agony of thought, why should he spare others this pain? Why should he shield those who until now drank, guffawed, gorged themselves, cracked inane jokes, and found life beautiful”
-Czeslaw Miłosz, "The Captive Mind"
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
-Mark Twain
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up" (1936)
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
"What makes a foreign policy democratic is its respect for the wishes of the majority in the country affected as well. That is what was wrong with much of Reagan's policy towards Central America. That is what has been wrong with Soviet Policy towards Central Europe since 1944"
-The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, Timothy Garton Ash
"Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity."
-Aristotle
"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."
-Malcolm X
"Stalin himself said that introducing communism to poland was like putting a saddle on a cow; the Poles though it was like putting a yoke on a stallion"
-Timothy Garton Ash, "The Polish revolution: Solidarity"
"I'm pink, therefore I'm Spam"
-Famous Philosopher
"If triangles had a god, it would have three sides."
-Yiddish Proverb
"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because they build cars and buildings and start wars, and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
-Douglas Adams
It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.
-Charlotte Bronte
“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”
-Ralph Nader
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
-Oscar Wilde
“The conception of the purpose of social organization is a specifically leftist one. The Left, the party of hope, sees our country’s moral identity as still to be achieved, rather than needing to be preserved. The Right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact.”
-Richard Rorty, "Achieving our Country" (1998)
"In the emphasis television news places on disasters and human tragedies, it invites not purgation or understanding but sentimentality and pity emotions that are quickly exhausted and a pseudo-ritual of pseudo-participation in the events. And, as the mode is inevitably on of overdramatization, the responses soon become either stilted or bored."
-Daniel Bell, "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism"
People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts. If a man feels kindly and obliging, his neighbors will feel that way, too, before long. But if he scolds and scowls and criticizes—his neighbors will return scowl for scowl, and add interest!
-Eleanor H. Porter (1868-1920)
"Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings."
-George Eliot (1819-1880)
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
-Emma Lazarus “The New Colossus”
"Also in order to understand ourselves we need a great deal of humility. If you start by saying, ‘I know myself’, you have already stopped learning about yourself; or if you say, ‘There is nothing much to learn about myself because I am just a bundle of memories, ideas, experiences and traditions’, then you have also stopped learning about yourself. The moment you have achieved anything you cease to have that quality of innocence and humility; the moment you have a conclusion or start examining from knowledge, you are finished, for then you are translating every living thing in terms of the old. Whereas if you have no foothold, if there is no certainty, no achievement, there is freedom to look, to achieve. And when you look with freedom it is always new. A confident man is a dead human being."
-J. Krishnamurti, "Freedom From the Known"
"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe."
-Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
-Krishnamurti, J. "Freedom From the Known" (pp. 51-52)
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."
-Albert Ellis
"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
-Robert Louis Stevenson
"The young (Black) Panther grunted and muttered his appraisal. "Stupid bastards." Then rather scornfully he said, "I read your book "A Choice of Weapons". After seeing those pigs with their guns aimed at us, would you write the same way now?"
All three men awaited my answer, and never before had I felt so defensive about something I had written. "Brother, I'm riding with you. If they had fired into this car I would have died with you. So don't hand me your horseshit. You've got a forty-five automatic on your lap, and I've got a thirty-five-millimeter camera on mine. And I still think my weapon is more powerful." No reply; silence fell."
-Gordon Parks, "A Hungry Heart: A Memoir" (2005)
"What in a nutshell, are the fundamental errors in the doctrine and practice of econmic libertarianism, and do they justify calling it, in Catholic terms, a 'heresy'?
These errors are best seen as a complex of inter-related ideas, many of which are not nexessarily bad in themselves, but are distorted or out of proportion. We might compare these ideas with the hormones in the human body, each of which is necessary, but any one of which can cause serious illness if it is either deficent or present in excess. The health of the body requires correct hormonal balance. Likewise, the health of an economy and society requires fair and reasonable balances between, for example, the interests of the individual and those of the community; between the needs of workers, of consumers and of investors; between fredom of enterprise and regulation to prevent excessive abuses.
Libertarian economic thought shows deplorably little concern with this need for balance. Too often it calls for utmost freedom for the entrepreneur, best possible value for the consumer, maximum return for the investor, keenest possible competition, minimum public spending, and other such superlatives. It is unwilling to recognize that maximizing (or minimizing) one varable gennerally means shrinking (or inflating) one or more other varables, often with unhappy results."
–Angus Sibley “The ‘Poisoned Spring’ of Economic Libertarianism” (2011)