Quotes
Quotes + thoughts that have struck and stuck with me. Dated when written/received, not when authored.
1/7/24
“Eventually all the things that are meant to happen, will happen.” - Me
12/7/23
“Everybody you meet in this world is either a fountain or a drain.” - Travis Kecle’s college coach
11/5/23
Surfing has taught me to do something without seeking a quantifiable result. - Me
10/31/23
“People are trying to take the nuance out of speech in American culture.” - Dave Chappelle
10/27/23
“When everything means everything, nothing means anything.” - Unattributed
10/16/23
“It’s fewer things done better to the Nth degree that actually causes the business to win. One of my favorite quotes is that ‘most businesses die from indigestion, not starvation.’” - Michael Shewmake, owner of Atlas Coffee
10/13/23
“Once you see the world in this way — as groups of the oppressed and oppressors, with the oppressed always justified in their resistance to the oppressors — the rights of individual Jews, or whites, or Asians, or even dissident non-whites are irrelevant. It’s all about “power structures” and “systems” and “context”. All morality is relative to privilege. There is not a trace of universalism among the woke left, not a single objective measurement of morality except what is justified in response to “oppression”. - Andrew Sullivan
10/9/23
Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. - Lao Tzu
10/7/23
Life is triggering. Part of being an adult is learning to take responsibility for your feelings instead of insisting that it’s the world’s responsibility not to trigger you. We all understand this 99% of the time. Why woke institutions suddenly forget this when confronted with black anger (or Indigenous anger or LGBTQ anger, etc.) is what TED’s critics, myself included, “just don’t get”. - Coleman Hughes
9/24/23
“If a man does not master his circumstances, he is bound to be mastered by them.” - A Gentleman in Moscow
9/19/23
“Learn from the past, don’t live in it.” - Me
9/13/23
“Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.” - General John Stark
9/4/23
“Don’t let your mind kill your heart and soul.” - A postcard
9/3/23
"It seems to me the best way to make money out of art is not to even try. It doesn't take much to be a successful artist-all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it. The thing people most admired about Picasso wasn't his work/life balance."- Banksy
8/30/23
“We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” - Charles Bukowski
8/21/23
“If the climate doesn’t change, call me. That’s when we’ll have a fucking problem.”- Me
8/6/23
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” - Lau Tzu
7/26/23
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” - Seneca
7/15/23
“I’m not rooting against anyone, I’m just rooting for myself.” - Stephen A Smith
7/13/23
“For the African-American community, the path [toward a more perfect union] means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances — for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs — to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”
- Barack Obama
7/9/23
“Temporary is my time. Ain’t nothing in this world that’s mine.” - Avett Brothers
7/9/23
“If I should go by in the wink of an eye
Do not worry for me where I’m bound
Beginnings and endings are only pretendings
I’ll see you next time around.”
- Poem at the Carousel of Happiness in Nederland, CO
6/16/23
“It’s easier to fool a man than persuade him he’s been fooled.” - Mark Twain
6/14/23
“The thinking brain is a curse.” - Me
5/31/23
“Fame has replaced great as a currency in modern times. Fame is the currency now. You used to have to be great to become famous. Now you don’t have to be the best at anything and you can be famous.” - Jimmy Iovine
5/2/23
The field of science is one of study and practice, of trial and error, of hypothesis. These features not only allow the field to progress and discover new things, but also to be open to discovering new things. There is never an end point. Nothing is ever settled. To declare that science is settled is antithetical to the base principle of the entire discipline. - Me
4/28/23
“I believe that we are engaged in committing suicide: intellectual suicide, moral suicide and physical suicide. If there is anything as important as stopping us poisoning our seas and destroying our forests, it is stopping us poisoning our minds and destroying our souls.” - Iain McGilchrist
4/27/23
“Political correctness comes from the Soviet Union and political correctness was a way of saying, ‘What you’re saying is true, but we don’t like hearing it.’ - Konstantin Kisin
“This woke ideology is so dangerous in the west because people in other countries aren’t teaching their young children to hate their own country. And if you continue to do this how will the west fare in the battle of civilizations because that’s what we’re in.” - Konstantin Kisin
4/15/23
“Anyone who declares themselves the arbiter of consensus, that’s a very crazy, egomaniacal position to be in. The idea that I believe that I know what’s best for you - that’s insane. Criticism tells us more about the critic than the artist.” - Rick Rubin
4/9/23
If you covet life and lock it away in a box as one would a sacred possession, you will never take it out and put it on the line or push it to the limit, and in that way you will never live. - Me
3/29/23
“The function of standardized education is general conformity, not free thought.” - Russell Brand
3/21/23
“There’s a difference between living and surviving. What are you prioritizing?” - Raphael Reiter
3/18/23
“The hypocrites are those people who regard as good whatever the world acclaims as good and regard as right whatever the world acclaims as right.” - Alan Watts
3/13/23
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’
3/1/23
If you decide to put something off until tomorrow, and you do that thing tomorrow, you are really doing it today and you are really doing it now, because that tomorrow in which you promised yourself you’d do the thing has become today. So you see, we can only ever do things now because now is the only moment we have to do anything. Tomorrow will eventually be today and now, and then in short order it will be yesterday and past. How may days, moments, now’s do you want to go by before you do that thing you yearn to do? Do not delay. Go forth. Begin. - Me
2/5/23
“Modern socio-political ideology is by design a perpetual conflict generator.” - Martin Gurri
2/2/23
“Deceiving people is a way of using them to get what you want. It can’t be a moral principle. If everyone deceived everyone else all trust would break down. No one would believe anything anyone ever said.” - Immanuel Kant
*Immanuel Kant, meet 2023
1/13/23
“Happiness is a state of mind, not of the world.” - Epictetus & Boethius
1/2/23
“When you do not fear ceasing to live so much as you fear never having begun to live, then you will be worthy of the cosmos that created you…” - Marcus Aurelius
1/1/23
But can AI synthesize as that word is understood to take in information and apply it across the entire human experience - not only the meaning, but also the sound, the context, the taste, the relation to the individual, etc? This I doubt and doubt highly. Is it coincidence that as AI develops, humanity is developing the understanding that we are not mechanistic, but rather an assemblage of items that are wholly biological? I think not. So as knowing moves in one direction, it also moves in the opposite. - Me
12/31/22
“Color-blind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for color-blindness is not to pretend you don’t notice color. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives. - Coleman Hughes
12/29/22
Social media is a wicked mirror. - Me
12/19/22
The burden and futility of constantly defending that which you believe in is like dragging around a corpse. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
12/18/22
I’d rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever. - Ad Rock, Beastie Boys
11/19/22
We are living through a paradigm shift and that is a shift in our attitude to experts. Experts have their place, but they shouldn’t be given sole control over any area of the human story. This is true with psychedelics and it is true about the entire human past.” - Graham Hancock
11/17/22
“People don’t realize that when they say ‘my life,’ that it’s a story they’re telling themselves in their minds. Many people’s identity - for their entire lives - is experienced as a problem.” -Eckhart Tolle
11/15/22
“Today we hear a lot of songs about love, and the mention of the big love thing on the way. You know what I would do? I would buy a gun and bar my door because I would know there is a storm of hypocrisy brewing.” - Alan Watts
11/12/22
“It should not be this scary to talk, about anything.” - Dave Chapelle
11/11/22
Calling someone “privileged” in order to dismiss or cancel them out of hand is reductive and lazy. It is a statement without merit and an anti-intellectual substitution for discourse. If you are going to employ monolithic categorizations for any individual or group on any subject, you are free to speak them, but you do not have a relevant voice. You have abdicated your own critical thought in favor of someone else’s templated narrative. Stop using broad tropes to try and negate people with whom you disagree. Engage in discourse - or - keep the regurgitated generalizations to yourself in order to avoid revealing your ignorance. - Me
11/6/23
“This is an exceedingly dangerous phenomenon because narcissism is about a lack of empathy. It's about entitlement. And it’s exploitative. ‘I'm a victim, so I'm a saint. I'm morally superior to you. I have a right because I have a grievance. I'm entitled. You have an obligation towards me.’” - Sam Vanknin
10/20/22
“So much of this (artistic) life, I think of it as self-gaming. You’ve got a chance to tell yourself all kinds of stories about what you’re doing. If you tell yourself the right stories, you become more positive and powerful. If you tell yourself the wrong stories, you don’t.” - George Saunders
9/20/22
“Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking.” - Eckhart Tolle
9/12/22
“There’s a lot of choice, and wherever there’s choice, there’s strife.” - Wynton Marsalis
8/28/22
“You cannot hide difficult or inconvenient truths in life because they make some people upset.” - Uncredited
8/13/22
“The idea that you can have one authority, one outlet, that you can go to in real time who can adjudicate what’s happening and always come up with what’s true is a myth.” -
7/20/22
The danger of a conscious being is that it can become obsessed with its own reality. We create the words, the archetypes, the constructs, and if we fully buy into them and forget that we are but one viewpoint and occupy one reality (our own), then we are blind to the fact that there are infinite realities and perspectives on Earth and in the universe. - Me
5/13/22
The concept of existentialism is kind of fucking dumb to be honest. We’re here. This is happening. You will die. If you die today, fine. If not, do it again tomorrow. - Me
5/9/22
“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.” - Robert Frost
11/15/21
“What more chilling in the modern world could there be than that most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived, unprepared for life.” - Tibetan Book of Living and Dying