Book bits

[Lilith7]

"Here bread is still the staff of life, a well of sweet water is more than jewels, a tree is shade, a piece of fertile ground is earth that will grow food, & hands are still marvellous creative instruments that can take the raw, rough stuff of rock & soil & water & make from it warmth & comfort, & beauty too. Perhaps they are so impressive a people because their normal expression – I realize this as I look around the crowded schoolroom – is one of quiet dignity. And I realize too that although I have seen these faces show grief, anger, bewilderment, laughter, pride, passion & sometimes resignation, what gives the faces a nobility almost unnatural in our age is the complete absence of resentment & pettishness, or those tell-tale lines that mark the frustration of little egos."

Charmian Clift (Possibly from Peel me a Lotus)


"I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

"You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

George Carlin. On the American dream


"We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to look down on – a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed & punished for all or any troubles."

Parable of the talents, Octavia Butler



"The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely & perplexed as one. And from this first ‘we’ there grows a still more dangerous thing: ”I have a little food” plus “I have none”.
The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. Its wool. It was my mother’s blanket – take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning – from ‘I’ to ‘we."


‘If he’ll take twenty five, I’ll do it for twenty. ‘No, me. I’m hungry. I’ll work for fifteen. I’ll work for food.
And this was good, for wages went down & prices stayed up. The great owners were glad & they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down & prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again.

And now the great owners invented a new method. A great owner bought a cannery. And when the peaches & pears were ripe he cut the price of fruit below the cost of raising it. And as cannery owner he paid himself a low price for the fruit & kept the price of canned goods up & took his profit.

And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom & they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, & starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full & the children of the poor grew up rachitic, & the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger & anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents & spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants & searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment."


The grapes of wrath, John Steinbeck.