"Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections."

-- John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)

"Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting."

-- Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Phuket, Thailand, 2005

 

"At least I didn’t bring Lycra back."

-- Justin Timberlake

"If "Flags of Our Fathers" feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight [World War II], that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines "Flags of Our Fathers," not exultation."

-- Manohla Dargis, "Movie Review - 'Flags of Our Fathers'", The New York Times

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

-- William James

Shanghai, China, 2005

 

Introducing for the first time / a Pharoah on the microphone! / Sing all hail / what will be revealed today / when we peer into the great unknown / from the line to the throne?

-- "The Laws Have Changed", The New Pornographers

"The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles with nuclear warheads...

"And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials...

"The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

-- Robert Kennedy

Hong Kong, 2005

 

"People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves."

-- Bruce Mau, "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth"

"The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures."

-- Clifford Geertz, "On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding", American Scientist

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia, 2005

 

"All forms of political organization have a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out."

-- E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America