Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos . . . . But the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes and, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. . . . My aim is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . I quite naturally looked upon Freud's theories as the application to the human being of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology. . . . Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. . . . But I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality.

If somebody says, I love you, to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? I love you, too.

Kurt Vonnegut

To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.

Charles Eames

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.

Jane Austen

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.

P. J. O'Rourke

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

Gloria Steinem

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

Warren Buffett

I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system.

Jerry Brown

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.

Kurt Vonnegut

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Helen Keller

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

Alexis de Tocqueville

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

A. N. Wilson

It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

Neil Gaiman