Kevin Carson > Kevin's Quotes

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
― Anne Frank

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

[From the Preface]”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
― Stokely Carmichael

“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else.”
― Stokely Carmichael

“By weaponizing the discourse of human rights to justify the use of force against governments that resisted the Washington consensus, this group of well-connected liberals was able to stir support where the neocons could not. Their brand of interventionism appealed directly to the sensibility of the Democratic Party's metropolitan base, large swaths of academia, the foundation-funded human rights NGO complex, and the New York Times editorial board. The xhibition of atrocities allegedly committed by adversarial governments, either by Western-funded civil society groups, major human rights organizations or the mainstream press, was the military humanists' stock in trade, enabling them to mask imperial designs behind a patina of "genocide prevention." With this neat tactic, they effectively neutralized progressive antiwar elements and tarred those who dared to protest their wars as dictator apologists.”
― Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
― Lilla Watson

“If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have? This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it's the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don't think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking about arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“I am a seed incapable of growth I can’t write you any poetry
I can’t apologise eloquently, I can’t show you your beauty. I can’t be lovely to be around.”
― Abeer Abdullah, The World Is Too Full to Talk About

“Had I not come from the core of her bones
I do not think my mother would have ever loved me.”
― Abeer Abdullah, The World Is Too Full to Talk About

“My eyes have adjusted to the colorlessness
of living in a country like this
But brutal to give the prisoner a window
And every now and then I can see
And it makes my outline crumble.”
― Abeer Abdullah, The World Is Too Full to Talk About

“Great beliefs always come out of the sewers of cities, not out of the towers of the ziggurats.”
― Cordwainer Smith

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“It requires conducive social conditions, rather than monstrous people, to produce heinous deeds.”
― Albert Bandura, Selective Activation and Disengagement of Moral Control

“The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.”
― William Blum

“No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”
― William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

“Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.”
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

“The United States is not concerned with this thing called ‘democracy’, no matter how many times every American president uses the word each time he opens his mouth. As noted in the Introduction, since 1945 the US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries.”
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

“The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire.”
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

“Michael Parenti has observed: The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere – including the people of North America – the blessings of an untrammeled ‘free market’ corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many.16”
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

“Do you remember the classic example of chutzpah? It’s the young man who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan. The Bush administration’s updated version of that was starting a wholly illegal, immoral, and devastating war and then dismissing all kinds of criticism of its action on the grounds that ‘we’re at war.”
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

“The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: ‘The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.”
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else