“Be fully aware of what you’re doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living.” Island — Aldous Huxley

“Many people fail because their brains, their three-and-a-half-pound blood-soaked sponges, their dogs’ breakfasts, don’t work well enough. The cause of a failure can be as simple as that. Some people, try as they may, can’t cut the mustard! That’s that!” Timequake — Kurt Vonnegut

““As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation,” the first MetaCop says.” Snow Crash: A Novel — Neal Stephenson

“a philistine English periodical, the Spectator,” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games.” Timequake — Kurt Vonnegut

“This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.” Snow Crash: A Novel — Neal Stephenson

“It would over-egg the lily. It would gild the pudding.” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.” Jitterbug Perfume: A Novel — Tom Robbins

““We did agree, that you wouldn’t do that.” “I have to do what I love, Wilf. I wasn’t loving not doing it.” The Peripheral — William Gibson

“So miracles were possible, after all. The Internet bookstores worked. Culture, despite the disappearances and guilt, was still alive, in a permanent state of transformation,” 2666: A Novel — Roberto Bolaño and Natasha Wimmer

“Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.” The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell and Daniel C. Dennett

“The heels of her oxblood boots struck the waxed floor loudly, advertising her traveling whereabouts like a GPS.” Flight Behavior — Barbara Kingsolver

“Bee was small-featured except for her eyes, which seemed to contain two forms of life, the subject matter and its hidden implications.” White Noise — Don DeLillo

“Everybody knows that a business man who has been ruined is better off so far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined.” The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell and Daniel C. Dennett

“The institutions of Western Christendom embodied a theory which was really believed, as no theory by which our present institutions can be defended is now believed.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“She wondered if anyone totally understood how banks could make the ground shift underfoot and turn real things into empty air, just with a word.” Flight Behavior — Barbara Kingsolver

“It is the insistence of legalists and friends of peace upon the maintenance of the status quo that has driven Germany into militarism.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“History was going to go like this: lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win.” The Ministry for the Future: A Novel — Kim Stanley Robinson

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.” Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl

“He might have warmed up more to culture if it didn’t act quite so compulsory.” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“Before the war, men might have said that India and Europe are not analogous, because India is less civilized than Europe; but now, I hope, no one would have the effrontery to maintain anything so preposterous.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“We can’t really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we’re forced to stumble in someone else’s.” Shantaram: A Novel — Gregory David Roberts

“The effects of Western colonialism and capitalism have created political economies that compel people to move, and yet the West denies culpability and accountability for displaced migrants.” Undoing Border Imperialism — Harsha Walia and Andrea Smith

“Establishing moral validity is a less costly and more effective approach.” The Collapse of Complex Societies — Joseph A. Tainter and Colin Renfrew

“These represent the sacred four directions, red for the west, white for the north, yellow for the east, and black for the south.” Lakota Woman — Richard Erdoes Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes

“The universe is wider than our views of it.” Walden — Henry David Thoreau

“Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.” The Bone Clocks: A Novel — David Mitchell

““While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Timequake — Kurt Vonnegut

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.” Walden — Henry David Thoreau

“It is the source of all true art and science.” Timequake — Kurt Vonnegut

“but if they did not laugh, it not would not be the teaching of the Tao.” Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu and Robert Brookes

“He saw blue posters with a woman’s face on. She had pained eyes like somebody who’s embarrassed by you but is too polite to say, and a nose built only for looking down.” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“Beliefs, like communicable diseases, are highly infectious.” Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe — Richard Holloway

“Abraham in Ethiopia cannot cross the border, but his beans carry the fragrant aromas of coffee down the sparkling Western city streets.” Undoing Border Imperialism — Harsha Walia and Andrea Smith

“we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant restless sea of metaphor which it is.” The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes

“Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“borders are the nexus of most systems of oppression.” Undoing Border Imperialism — Harsha Walia and Andrea Smith

“He saw blue posters with a woman’s face on. She had pained eyes like somebody who’s embarrassed by you but is too polite to say, and a nose built only for looking down.” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“Do not be content with an alternation between moments of rationality and moments of irrationality. Look into the irrationality closely with a determination not to respect it and not to let it dominate you.” The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell and Daniel C. Dennett

“Mucho Maas, home, bounded through the screen door. “Today was another defeat,” he began.” The Crying of Lot 49 — Thomas Pynchon

“‘Na, komm’ schonl Hor’ aufi’” Shantaram: A Novel — Gregory David Roberts

“The desperation might be worse now, but not the corruption. The drug trade, he conceded, was something new, but the real burden of the drug trade on Mexican society (and on American society) was overstated.” 2666: A Novel — Roberto Bolaño and Natasha Wimmer

“The object of the pacifist should be to give men more and more political control over their own lives, and in particular to introduce democracy into the management of industry, as the syndicalists advise.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“The International Labor Organization estimates that there are eighty-six million migrant workers across the world.)” Undoing Border Imperialism — Harsha Walia and Andrea Smith

“‘Na, komm’ schonl Hor’ aufi’” Shantaram: A Novel — Gregory David Roberts

“Education as a political weapon could not exist if we respected the rights of children.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“It takes a tremendous rearrangement of mental priorities for women to eat well, that is to spend money on their insides instead of their outsides.” The Female Man — Joanna Russ

“Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation.” Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power — Byung-Chul Han and Erik Butler

“The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“White-water driving by some Netto Fabulous crash-dummy who bled Burberry,” Jerusalem — Alan Moore