tragically unhip | quotes

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." ~ Bill Vaughn

“We do not have to accept mediocrity or compromise our values. We can decide to be great, we can address great problems, we can see great possibilities ." - Senator John Edwards

"a person who is ignored, whose presence is not acknowledged, slowly dies. only mindfulness can bring them back to life. embraced by your mindfulness, they will bloom like a flower." ( via ) ~Thich Nhat Hanh

"you can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person." {alec waugh}

"To explain why we become attached to our birthplaces, we pretend that we are trees and speak of "roots." Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places." {salman rushdie}

"A community can represent many things and be directed toward a definite goal, but community itself is the focus of a spiritual science that inspires universality. Day-to-day living in a community fosters a very practical concept of existence. Community life represents the frontier between the macro and micro in terms of human organization, making it possible to experience all levels of human existence. The community is, therefore, a vast landscape for a material realization whenever each person enters into contract with the gifts, virtues, and shortcomings of its members. It is also the immense spiritual and psychic laboratory that enables our spirits to develop." {Alex Polari de Alverga in Forest of Vision: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality and the Santa Daime Tradition}

"it is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither." {Mark Twain}

"no one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." {h.l. mencken}

"the great truths of human life do not spring newborn to each new generation. they derive from long experience." {frederick osborn}

"no one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of anyone else." {charles dickens}

"a community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm." {enrik ibsen}

"the basic ideas of the web is that an information space through which people can communicate, but communicate in a special way: communicate by sharing their knowledge in a pool. the idea was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. the idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out." {tim berners-lee}

in a certain sense, every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history. {nicholas berdyaev}

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive. {joseph campbell}

Our own success, to be real, must contribute to the success of others. {eleanor roosevelt}

Q: You've also had a couple dozen buyout offers for craigslist. Aren't you tempted to cash out, move from your foggy neighborhood, and buy an island somewhere? A: I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge. But I'm pretty happy with nerd values : Get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world. {craig newmark, founder of craigslist , in Wired }

"From our earliest days, we understand that there are tasks ahead of us to accomplish and landmarks to achieve. Life often looks like an obstacle course. In order to maximize success, we spend a good deal of time discussing what stands in the way of it. 1. Declare yourself to be a contribution 2. Throw yourself into life as someone who makes a difference, accepting that you may not understand how or why When you play the contribution game, it is never a single individual who is transformed. Transformation overrides the divisions of identity and possession that are the architecture of the measurement model, recasting the tight pattern of scarcity into a widespread array of abundance." {benjamin zander, The Art of Possibility }