Quotes from 2022

Everybody always thought they were right, and shared, too, the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true.

Life was indeed a continuous lesson in finding ways to be less troubled by certain things, so that we might make room for new concerns, which arrived with the promptness and regularity of mail coaches.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck.

The Dutch are posthuman already.

That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

Monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.

The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.

The narcissism of small differences. That’s an odd name. It’s Freud’s name. Means more regard for yourself than for your allies or the problems you both face.

“When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”

Where there’s a will there’s a won’t.

Quoting Ambrose Bierce.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Quoting Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.