Latest Commonplace Additions

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

— David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021

From the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these pages we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

— David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021

From the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Mistrust of experts, in spite of all that the apologists for technocracy can advance against it, is deeply rooted in the English character, and Fen, whose habit of mind was not cosmopolitan, shared in it abundantly.

— Edmund Crispin, 1950

From the book Sudden Vengeance

Superstition is not mere intellectual error; it is a part of the emotional life, and the worldly-wise who suppress it do so at the risk of impoverishing their souls, an eventuality which for the most part they do not succeed in avoiding.

— Edmund Crispin, 1950

From the book Sudden Vengeance

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

— Marie Curie, 1937

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

— G. K. Chesterton

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

— G. K. Chesterton

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

— Henry Miller, 1972

From the book On Turning Eighty

She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

— Leif Enger, 2024

From the book I Cheerfully Refuse

The stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.

Therein lies our hope and our destiny.

— Rachel Carson, 1962-06

From 1962 Commencement Address at Scripps College

To manifest possibility in the zone of dialogical imagination, David [Graeber] learned, there was no need to persuade everybody to agree on every issue. ‘You don’t even want to achieve ideological uniformity,’ he averred. An assembly that meshes over a definition of a specific problem and a commitment to a specific course of action forms ‘a community of purpose without a community of definition.’ The rules of discourse can support a revisable consensus. Do not blow up minor moral differences into mortal threats. Do extend the benefit of the doubt. Do not reduce perspectives to a juxtaposition of opposite extremes. Do look for zones of affinity. If such rules do not yield a creative synthesis that everybody can accept, then the rules can change. Deliberative assemblies, when properly facilitated, encompass a plurality of perspectives from a perspective that refuses to impose itself as a worldview. The crux is that everybody gets a say.

— John Summers, 2024-05-24

From David Graeber’s Magic Words

We stayed with the blues and Francie sensing a vein of covenant sang in her scratchiest aching voice, the reason we cajoled her into the band to start with, and it began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

— Leif Enger, 2024

From the book I Cheerfully Refuse

I know there’s a proverb which says ‘To err is human’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.

— Agatha Christie, 1968

From Halloween Party

That seems to me the great American danger we’re all in, that we’ll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.

— Mike Nichols, 1968

Instead of pursuing endless growth, it is time to pursue wellbeing for all people as part of a thriving world, with policymaking that is designed in the service of this goal. This results in a very different conception of progress: in the place of endless growth we seek a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, a critical challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether or not they grow.

— Kate Raworth, 2024-05-13

From the essay What does progress look like on a planet at its limit?

Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature; now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune – it may well be our final tragedy – that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself.

— Rachel Carson, 1962

From Rachel Carson Speech at Scripps College

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.

—

I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the citty would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein.

— Ross MacDonald, 1968

From the book The Instant Enemy

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

— Marcel Proust, 1919

From Within a Budding Grove

I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “Okay, I’ll send you the pages.”

Then I go down the steps and my wife calls, “Where are you going?” “Well,” I say, “I’m going to buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet.” And I say, “Hush.”

So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately.

I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it.

Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home.

And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

— Kurt Vonnegut, 1996

From Kurt Vonnegut lecture at Western Case University