“
It’s a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we’re faking them. And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it’s joy we’re looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation. So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.
Dec. 18, 2012 at 10:49pm with 36 notes
Reblogged from fortune-n-glory
“
You know why the birdies wake up singing, don’t you? … They’re happy to be alive one more day. You can’t count on that, Hewes. Them little birdies know it too. That’s why they’re out there singing all the time. They’re trying to tell us something. ‘Tweet, tweet, you’re alive, you ignorant asshole.’
“
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes. My father died many years ago now - of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
“
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.
Dec. 2, 2012 at 11:02pm with 67 notes
Reblogged from wonklife
“
Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs.
“
There is nothing I hate or fear more than mimes.
7:33pm with 19 notes
Reblogged from somebodysaiditbetter
“
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Nov. 26, 2012 at 4:20pm with 9 notes
Reblogged from notdefectivejusthuman
“
We spend our days in the solitude of our minds and despite our social aspirations, our need to be accepted and admired and known, nobody ever really knows us and we never really know them. Think of the secrets locked in the back of your mind, the secrets that no one knows, not even your closest friend, the thoughts that are stored in your mind and your mind only. Examine those and tell me that there is somebody out there who really knows you.
Nov. 23, 2012 at 5:00pm with 5 notes
Reblogged from shivainlondon
“
Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time.
“
It was one man who invented the wheel. It was one man who discovered the law of gravitation. Nothing that happens is without effect. If you throw a stone in a pond the universe isn’t quite the same as it was before.
7:00pm with 28 notes
Reblogged from fortune-n-glory
“
Here’s what you need to know about life in general - any place that refuses to sell you a burger under medium temperature… is basically on the side of the terrorists.
6:00pm with 85 notes
Reblogged from fortune-n-glory
“
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
“
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
“
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
“
There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.
