"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"The climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us... and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

"For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place."

-- Michael Pollan, "Why Bother?", The New York Times Magazine

"All periods of social decline and disintegration are characterized by overestimation of the sexual in life and in ideology, and what is more, of the sexual in an extreme unidimensional conception; its asocial aspect, taken in isolation, is advanced to the forefront. The sexual aims at becoming a surrogate for the social... Only those social relations that can be sexualized are meaningful and valuable. Everything else becomes null and void."

-- V.N. Volosinov, "The Content of Consciousness as Ideology", Freudianism: A Marxist Critique

Nha Trang, Vietnam

"While each one of [The Moderns] defines this [Natural] Law in his own fashion, all of them base it on such metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people capable of understanding these principles, let alone of discovering them on their own. So that all the definitions by these learned men, which in every other respect are in constant contradiction with one another, agree only in this, that it is impossible to understand the Law of Nature and to obey it without being a very great reasoner and a profound Metaphysician. Which precisely means that in order to establish society men must have employed an enlightenment which develops only with much difficulty and among very few people within society itself."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men

"Tibet is our country’s territory. You have no right to interfere in our interior affairs... A boycott may not be the right long-term solution, but we have to give the French people a lesson."

-- Zhu Xiaomeng, in "Chinese Urge Anti-West Boycott Over Tibet Stance", The New York Times

"The self-assertive shrillness of protest [in the modern age] arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protesters can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protesters can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protesters’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protesters rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this."

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

"Theories are word-tools for navigating history, directing movements, defining enemies, predicting the future, getting specific, exploring connections, and moving through the hard places. Theories are word-tools for saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Theories are community builders — some divide and exclude, and some invite and incite. Theories also have smaller journeys between lovers, between minds. Some theories are deadly... Which theories do you live in?"

-- Jacquelyn N. Zita, Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender

"Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning — an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies."

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Meditation of Mr. Churchill, Inscribed on His Pulpit", The Complete Poetical Works

"Style equals accuracy. Put the word “change” in Comic Sans and the idea feels lightweight and silly. Place it in Times Roman and it feels self-important. In Gotham, it feels just right. Inspiring, not threatening."

-- Brian Collins, in "Campaign Stops: To The Letter Born", The New York Times

"[I]t is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse."

-- Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Pai, Thailand

"Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow... It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again."

-- William James, Principles of Psychology

"[T]he security cordon around the [Olympic] torch was so dense that the flame and those carrying it were often barely visible to crowds."

-- Katrin Bennhold and John F. Burns, "Olympic Torch Relay in Paris Halted as Protests Spread", The New York Times

"The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations

"In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

"All of it is meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, the thinking goes, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young."

-- Fred A. Bernstein, "A House Not for Mere Mortals", The New York Times

"How far can the empirical debunking of human moral nature go? If science tells me that I love my children more than other children only because they share my genes, should I feel uneasy about loving them extra? If science tells me that I am nice to other people only because a disposition to be nice ultimately helped my ancestors spread their genes, should I stop being nice to people? If I care about myself only because I am biologically programmed to carry my genes into the future, should I stop caring about myself? It seems that one who is unwilling to act on human tendencies that have amoral evolutionary causes is ultimately unwilling to be human. Where does one draw the line between correcting the nearsightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely? This, I believe, is among the most fundamental moral questions we face in an age of growing scientific self-knowledge."

-- Joshua Greene, "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul", in The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development

Tokyo, Japan