QUOTES: LAO TZU

  

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

 —Lao Tzu

 

 

 

  

QUOTABLE QUOTES: WORDS TO THE WISE

  

 

“A ceasefire is when others cease and Israel fires.—Francesca Albanese on the Israel/Gaza conflict.

 

“We are closer to death than to life.”—A Nasser Hospital medical staffer in Gaza commenting on his social media while the Israeli military shoot-up tent encampments on the hospital grounds. (July 17/25)

 

“The repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, and they die. I have never had so many patients die because they can’t get enough food to recover…. The medical teams here have also been seeing a clear pattern of people being shot in certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals, which seems to indicate deliberate targeting.”—Prof Nick Maynard a Oxford-based gastrointestinal surgeon currently in Gaza. The Telegraph, July 17/25)

 

“First of all, [the] real disgrace for the United Nations is that there are 60,000 people who have been killed in 20 months and Gaza has been turned into a meat grinder and it continues under our eyes, and while member states start uttering words of condemnation while trading with one hand in weapons and trading with goods and with the other. So, this is the real disgrace.”

—Francesca Albanese in response to quote from the poisonous toad Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon, calling her second three-year appointment as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories “a disgrace”.

 

“I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred... The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”—Nelson Mandela on ending the system of apartheid (Afrikanns: “separateness”) and creating a democratic South Africa for all races. 

 

“The West has always a repetition of the very old habit to create some havoc, some mess and then to fish in the muddy waters.” 

—Russian Foreign Minister Sergi Lavrov from an Al Jazerra interview (December/2024)

 

Cheers, Jake. ________________________________________________

 

 

 

QUOTES: RACHEL CARSON

 

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”  

―Rachel Carson

 

QUOTES: J.M. COETZEE

 

“WHAT WOULD I have said if they had let me go on? That it is worse to beat a man’s feet to pulp than to kill him in combat? That it brings shame on everyone when a girl is permitted to flog a man? That spectacles of cruelty corrupt the hearts of the innocent? The words they stopped me from uttering may have been very paltry indeed, hardly words to rouse the rabble. What, after all, do I stand for besides an archaic code of gentlemanly behaviour towards captured foes, and what do I stand against except the new science of degradation that kills people on their knees, confused and disgraced in their own eyes.” ("The magistrate", from Waiting for the Barbarians.)

 

QUOTES: JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

 

 

History is ever a trickster, and the zeitgeist is its consigliere.

—James Howard Kunstler