-
all theories
like cliches
shot to hell,
all these small faces
looking up
beautiful and believing;
I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe but believe is a
graveyard.
we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird
wish us
luck.
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
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“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
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The roof is on fire.
-Bloodhound Gang
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“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
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The day will come
When my body no longer exists
But in the lines of this poem
I will never let you be alone
The day will come
When my voice is no longer heard
But within the words of this poem
I will continue to watch over you
The day will come
When my dreams are no longer known
But in the spaces found in the letters of this poem
I will never tire of looking for you
― Sapardi Djoko Damono
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"If human consciousness is the most wonderful thing on earth, the attempt to fathom the depths of the psychophysiological action of narcotic and stimulating drugs makes this wonder seem greater still, for with their help man is enabled to transfer emotions of everyday life, as well as his will and intellect, to unknown regions; he is enabled to attain degrees of emotional intensity and duration which are otherwise unknown to the brain."
- Louis Lewin
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"Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we can not eat money."
~ Chief Seattle
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“The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang.
We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed.
Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in.
It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.”
― Stephen W. Hawking
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“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.
But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
― Bertrand Russell
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“We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits.
I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel.
It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
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“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself. What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately. A man is a lonely thing.”
― John Steinbeck
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There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
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“Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.
This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
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“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
― Steve Jobs
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“When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots?”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic
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“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning -- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream -- alone.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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The good lord came with ten commandments. The president has come with fourteen.
...........................George Clemenceau
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“The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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“There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go.
But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars.
You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.
Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...
If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel.
We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System.
But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.”
― Elon Musk
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“When it comes to danger,” he’d say, “everybody’s chicken. But there are two kinds of chickens — chicken hawks and chicken shits. And it doesn’t matter how high up you throw chicken shit, it ain’t never going to fly.”
― S.G. Redling, The Widow File
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“The gate really is inside each of us. Each of us has a door to walk through, maybe a thousand, and if we don’t walk through them, we aren’t alive. We aren’t human until we walk through that gate regardless of what’s on the other side.”
― S.G. Redling, Damocles
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“I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
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The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
- Wallace Stevens
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A Scottish Soldier
There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier,
Who wandered far away
And soldiered far away.
There was none bolder,
With good broad shoulder.
He'd fought in many a fray
And fought and won.
He'd seen the glory,
He'd told the story
Of battles glorious and deeds victorious.
But now he's sighing,
His heart is crying
To leave those green hills of Tyrol.
Because those green hills are not highland hills
Or the island hills,
they're not my land's hills
And, fair as these green foreign hills may be,
They are not the hills of home.
And now this soldier, this Scottish soldier,
Who wandered far away
And soldiered far away,
Sees leaves are falling
And death is calling
And he will fade away in that far land.
He called his piper, his trusty piper,
And bade him sound a lay... a pibroch sad to play
Upon a hillside, a Scottish hillside
Not on those green hills of Tyrol.
Because those green hills are not highland hills
Or the island hills,
They're not my land's hills
And, fair as these green foreign hills may be,
they are not the hills of home.
And now this soldier, this Scottish soldier
Will wander far no more and soldier far no more
And on a hillside, a Scottish hillside
You'll see a piper play his soldier home.
He's seen the glory, he's told his story
Of battles glorious and deeds victorious
The bugles cease now, he is at peace now,
Far from those green hills of Tyrol.
Because those green hills are not highland hills
Or the island hills,
They're not my land's hills
And, fair as these green foreign hills may be,
they are not the hills of home.
Because those green hills are not highland hills
Or the island hills,
They're not my land's hills
And, fair as these green foreign hills may be,
they are not the hills of home.
- Songwriters: Andy Stewart / Iain MacFadyen
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“Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad.
The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude