Joel Thomas > Joel's Quotes

“One of the least meaningful and most overused words in the English language is 'sustainability.' For most Americans, it means something like 'pretty much the way I live right now, though maybe with a different car.' A good test of any activity or product described as sustainable is to multiply it by 300 million (the approximate current population of the United States) and then by 9 or 10 billion (the expected population of the world by midcentury) and see if it still seems green. This is not an easy test to pass”
― David Owen, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

“There are too many people in the world, and too many more are on the way. This is an issue that, in the United States, both conservatives and liberals have often seemed eager to avoid--for conservatives, perhaps, because it raises questions about family size, birth control, and abortion, and for liberals because it raises questions about immigration. Every one of the world's environmental problems is made worse by increases in the number of humans, and, most of all, by increases in the number of Americans, since U.S. residents--whether manufactured locally or imported from abroad--have the largest energy and carbon footprints in the world.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“So the organisation of society on the basis of functions, instead of on the basis of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest is not service but gain. It means, in the third place, that the obligation for the maintenance of the service shall rest upon the professional organisations of those who perform it, and that, subject to the supervision and criticism of the consumer, those organisations shall exercise so much voice in the government of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is discharged.”
― R.H. Tawney

“Unoccupied space will never cease to change simply because nothing forbids it to do so.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“He loved more than anything to fly. His sole conflict was with gravity.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Immensely clever story, and quite creepy, in a delightfully scary way.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I must read.
I must read.
I must read.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Darkness is impossible to remember. Consequently cavers desire to return to those unseen depths where they have just been. It is an addiction. No one is ever satisfied. Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says science (so warns science.)”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unourned, well, you get the drift.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you?”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only science.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The horror! The horror!”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Happily, solving problems by intensifying production and increasing complexity does not always yield catastrophic results.”
― Joseph A. Tainter