quotes

"By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects" -  from a 1967 essay written by the historian Lynn Townsend White Jr 

"the world is your bedroom, as it has been since the dawn of time." http://tomallen.info/how-my-location-independent-lifestyle-works/

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” –William Arthur Ward

As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/02/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?pagination=false

people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. - Terrance McKenna http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.shtml

Because if you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/1b7dfe34fced


In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. -- Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” -Steve Jobs (quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987)

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. -- O. Henry

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." T. Roosevelt

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” -- David Foster Wallace

"The paradox vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will some only when they make their tormentors suffer." -Unbroken (book)

Everything is supposed to be bigger and better online. But what I think people have lost sight of — and I don't think the internet has done a good job of self-evaluation in this respect — is the massive shift between the brave new internet world of the late '90s and now. Its early philosophy seemed to be one where everyone was an individual whose opinions were respected. A decade later, everything is corporate-owned, advertising is incessant, and the diverse opinions of internet commentary are often shouted down. Now there's much more online groupthink. - DJ Shadow, Wired: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/09/dj-shadow/all/1

"The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism, but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, political oppression" -- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune have not one place to hit me - Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici