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"Our cancerous industrialism, reducing all ideological differences to epiphenomena, has generated its own breed of witch doctor. These are men with a genius for control and organization, and the lust to administrate. They propose first to shrink our world to the dimensions of a global village, over which some technological crackpot will erect a geodesic dome to regulate air and light; at the same time the planetary superintendent of schools will feed our children via endless belt into reinforcement-trained boxes where they will be conditioned for their functions in the anthill arcology of the future. The ideal robot, after all, is simply a properly processed human being."
- Edward Abbey
"[Edward Abbey] is a man who wrote rapturously about the beauty of the wilderness, but also threw empty beer cans out of the window of his moving truck. When he was challenged about this, he said that the damage caused by an empty beer can on a desert road was nothing compared to the existence of the road, or of the truck. He wasn’t wrong."
- Paul Kingsnorth
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"I've said it before and I'll say it again: let the media you enjoy enhance your life, not define it."
-Jay Bauman
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"In 1692 in what is now Estonia, [...] a man named Thiess of Kaltenbrun confessed to being a werewolf. He explained that he and others fought demons on behalf of humans. Rather than being executed, he was instead merely flogged and then banished for admitting also to performing magic spells without calling on the Christian God for their power."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
"In 1692 in what is now Estonia, [...] a man named Thiess of Kaltenbrun confessed to being a werewolf. He explained that he and others fought demons on behalf of humans. Rather than being executed, he was instead merely flogged and then banished for admitting also to performing magic spells without calling on the Christian God for their power."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
You had me at 'flogging'. You had me at 'flogging'.
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"The greatest friends I ever had were the ones who never demanded I think like them, and who never demanded I hate others."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
Homer Simpson: "Donut?"
Lisa Simpson: "No thanks. Don't you have any fruit?"
Homer Simpson: "This has purple stuff inside. Purple is a fruit."
Hey! I'm watching you...
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"People will cheerfully admit that the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there."
"Without even passing out of date, every mode of internet-speak already sounds antiquated. Aren’t you embarrassed? Can’t you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?"
- Sam Kriss
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Along a similar vein, I always told my kids, "Backpacking is a fundamental exercise in being comfortable living within your own mind."
I'm sure many modern backpackers find a way to carry cell phones, GPS systems, music players, and whatnot with them, but I'm still happiest walking for 6-8 hours with no distractions other than the world around me and the sound of my bootsteps.
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I wish I could still do that.
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"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside."
- C.S. Lewis
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"[The Netherlands] went all around the world to find spices, and then never learned how to use them."
- Tarl Warwick
"If you write the keyword-laden babble for Emily’s Scrummy Kitchen, or monetised blog posts angling for answerboxes, or bludgeon-headed political takes that go viral every weekday, or flatly competent student essays, or little inspirational poems in lowercase, or absolutely anything to do with cryptocurrency—if your writing can be done by a machine because it is already machinelike—then ChatGPT will take your job. If you do screenplays for Netflix, it may have already done so. If you’re a coder, my advice is this: learn to write literary nonfiction."
- Sam Kriss
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
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"A few years later, people kept telling me to watch Better Call Saul. Oh, I think it’s right up your alley, Sam, they’d say, as if my alley is found on any map. It’s about the fast-talking comic-relief character from a prestige drama, they’d say—but get this, the comic-relief character has mental health problems. So I sat down and watched six seasons of Dark Lionel Hutz. I started imagining all the other characters whose important backstories needed to be fleshed out. We need to make them more human. We need to make them feel real.
How about a lusciously filmed period drama called Basil? A fourteen year old kid, gangly and awkward, lost in a grey industrial English town. The other children mock him relentlessly for his height. He lives with his father, a brooding, brutal man who never mentions what he did in the war—but the pallor of it seeps into every corner of their house, the corpses in the tank tracks and Dresden in flames. Young Basil has the opportunity to break the cycle of trauma, but over sixty hours of TV we watch the good in him slowly die. He turns to mockery. He turns to violence. The girl he loves can’t bear to look at him any more; she no longer recognises the bruised but hopeful innocent she once knew. In a fit of despair, Basil marries a distant, domineering woman he’s barely met and doesn’t much like. This is all he deserves. In the final scene, with his soul in tatters, he buys a hotel in Torquay."
- Sam Kriss
"As a child, Big Houses bored me to death. By ‘Big Houses’ I mean what we English call ‘stately homes’: vast piles built by the aristocracy and gentry from the early modern period, which reached their pomp in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My homeland is studded with these things. They were the status symbols which demonstrated the wealth, prestige, proper connections and landed power of the once-ruling elites. Today’s elites prefer to signal their status by firing themselves into space or buying up half the Internet, but back then it was all about having the right type of bouillon spoon and being invited to the correct dances in the pile next door."
- Paul Kingsnorth
"Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it."
- Laozi, Tao Te Ching, verse 29
"All you had to say was you're not an elf. Which is obvious."
- Kramer, Shadiversity
"Perhaps the ills of our day stem from a technological leap above real suffering and insecurity; perhaps after all, one does best to make no Promethean hurls ever upward to pure comfort and effortless existence. One finds that where these unfortunate luxuries visit the human creature, he loses romance and God, he forgets the wilderness so thoroughly that even when he is there he fails to see it. Love becomes as dry as a lawyer’s clauses, and the heart grows tired. Perhaps worst of all, he forgets his kin and their stories: he loses himself."
- Andy Hickman
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"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."
- Aldo Leopold
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"The second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along."
- Neil Gaiman
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"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
―
Vladimir I. LeninGeorge Galloway
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"In 1692 in what is now Estonia, [...] a man named Thiess of Kaltenbrun confessed to being a werewolf. He explained that he and others fought demons on behalf of humans. Rather than being executed, he was instead merely flogged and then banished for admitting also to performing magic spells without calling on the Christian God for their power."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
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"Northern New York State is a strange place; completely overshadowed by the obnoxious city which shares the state’s name, ‘deep upstate’ is obscure and essentially unknown. Having grown up there, I have struggled when traveling to adequately field inquiries regarding “where I come from”. If I say New York, they think Times Square. If I say “no, no, it’s sort of like Vermont but grittier and less quaint”, folks will often simply think I’m a little strange. They seem to figure that that’s a real weird way to describe Time Square (or somewhere close to it), though my town is nearly six hours from that wretched place."
- Andy Hickman
Middle of the sahara desert (well ok on the left side of it...) Begging starts crossing the line into a mugging
"Where are you from?"
"New york"
"Oh. new york..."
Put hands up and back away like I'm going to pull heavy artillery from my backpack...
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"Friends have commented on my own “bizarre behavior” at grocery stores as I frantically calculate the net unit price of foods — denying suggestions of gnocchi or asparagus for dinner like a viper, for the ‘net price’ is simply unthinkable. I sprint around Wal-Mart with blinders on my eyes, buying only cabbage and peanut-butter and discount milk, always purchasing the same items and ignoring all temptations to deviate from my thrifty choreography. Such a thing could only make sense to a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee."
- Andy Hickman
"Humans have existed for ~200,000 years. Left-right politics has existed for just ~200. It is but one flimsy page in our species' saga, and to assume it holds the best answer to problems that span all of history is to be a myopic prisoner of the zeitgeist."
- Gurwinder Bhogal
another gem!! nice!
"It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."
- G.K. Chesterton
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"Nihilist “organization”—the total transformation of the earth and society by machines, modern architecture and design, and the inhuman philosophy of “human engineering” that accompanies them—is a consequence of the unqualified acceptance of […] industrialism and technology […] as bearers of a worldliness that, if unchecked, must end in tyranny."
- Fr. Seraphim Rose
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"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
- Blaise Pascal
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"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
- Blaise Pascal
I've always that that backpacking is a tool that teaches you to be alone with yourself for 8 hours at a time. And it's a surprisingly difficult task for most.
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"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
- G.K. Chesterton
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“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
"It occurred to me, in California in June and in Atlanta in July and in New Orleans in August, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations. They had not run for student body office. They had not gone on to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives with a midnight drive to Carson City and a five-dollar ceremony performed by a justice still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles. They paid their bills or did not pay their bills, made down payments on tract houses, led lives on that social and economic edge referred to, in Washington and among those whose preferred locus is Washington, as “out there.” They were never destined to be, in other words, communicants in what we have come to call, when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, “the process."
- Joan Didion, Insider Baseball (1988)
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"It’s a sign of our times that even the commonplace things of life are ground down to gunpowder and packed into ideological bullets."
- Ruth Gaskovski
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"Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in their toolbox."
- anonymous
"Get in your mouse, and get out of here."
- Uncle Buck (John Candy), Uncle Buck (1989)
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"I’ve always had problems envisioning the underworld. Sulfurous flames belching up from gloomy caverns don’t trigger existential terror in me. This may be because I grew up in Minnesota, where, for over half the year, fire is inviting, cozy, not forbidding."
- Walter Kirn
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"[L]iteracy - the mastery of language and the knowledge of books - is not an ornament, but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power. Longer perspective will show that it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgement of ourselves and the possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow."
- Wendell Berry
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"Da solstice is da opposite of da equinox. Dat is da special day of da year when eggs spin on their sides."
"Dis is because Christopher Corrumbus discovered dat da world was round like a egg. He sailed to da west on his three chips, El Niño, da Pinto, and da Santa Monica Freeway. El Niño only happens every once in a while, da Santa Monica Freeway ain't goin' nowhere, an' da Pinto blows up. So dat is why dey call dis da solstice: Because it it happens once in a while, it ain't goin' nowhere, and after dis, da days get bigger."
"Dat is what you call science."
― "Stickbonker", City of Heroes player
"Ever wonder why ice cubes taste so boring? It's because you're make 'em out of stupid water, you bimbo. Put some fruit juice in there, and freeze it into ice cubes, and put that in your milk!"
- Dr. Steve Brule
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"Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe."
- Thomas Sowell
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"While we shouldn’t revere the past blindly, without an awareness of its failings, there are valuable things that we have been losing in recent history. The internet and high-speed devices were supposed to make us “smart”, yet often these technologies turn out to be cognitive sandpaper, rubbing against the grain of our minds, smoothing away all memory or interest in older knowledge and tradition, and roughing out those politically incorrect edges, so that what is left is an angular, standardized block of mental space, into which more new “smart” things can be efficiently inserted."
- Peco Gaskovski
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"Convenience is not a bad thing in itself, the argument goes. And all that may be true. But convenience as a philosophy for living is death. A pleasant death, but still death. The question, then, we need to ask ourselves is, How many convenient boxes does it take to kill a whole society?"
- Peco Gaskovski