BestWeCanDo

“Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics, we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what to pursue- control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”

http://bestwecando.ourproject.org/bluemars.html

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” – Richard Buckminster Fuller

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/06/16/50-quotes-americans-should-remember/

<Spencer> A lot of these are actually severely objectionable. “To impose taxes when the public exigencies require them is an obligation of the most sacred character, especially with a free people.” Implication being that without the imposition, presumably from the authority of government, we'd simply let each other fry. I'm sure that's true, at the moment. We have historical proof that it's true. It seems to me that this is the sort of truth that needs to change, rather than be adapted to.

“It may be a bad thing that so many people try to make good stories out of their lives. A story, after all, is as artificial as a mechanical bucking bronco in a drinking establishment.

And it may be even worse for nations to try to be characters in stories.

Perhaps these words should be carved over doorways of the United Nations and all sorts of parliaments, big and small: LEAVE YOUR STORY OUTSIDE.”

– except from Deadeye Dick, ISBN 0440117658, page 210

'The late psychotherapist Albert Ellis called self-esteem the greatest emotional disturbance of them all. Rate your individual acts as good or bad if you like, he advised, and by all means try to perform more good ones. But leave your self out of it.' –Oliver Burkeman