Your blood asks, how were the wealthy and the law interwoven? With what sulfurious iron fabric? How did the poor keep falling into the tribunals? How did the land become so bitter for poor children, harshly nourished on stone and grief? So it was, and so I leave it written. Their lives wrote it on my brow. Pablo Neruda - The Judges

Well, I don't care how long I live. Over this I have no control, but I do care about what kind of life I live, and I can control this. I may not live but another five minutes, but it will be five minutes definitely on my terms. George Jackson - Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

As long as the general population is passive, apethetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World

My favourite kebab shop! The food is fabulous, mouth watering. The staff are very friendly. Me and my wife sit outside and take our time over our kebab meal, which includes chips and a soft drink, great value. Very happy customers 5/5. Bernard - Google review

From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert... I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old. Liu Cixin - The Three Body Problem

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction fo the two: something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt). Jeanette Winterson - Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

Não existe vácuo politico - there is no such thing as a political vacuum. If you blow a hole in the center of the political system, taking power away from those who have it, then someone else is going to take it. If you want to knock the main players off the stage, you should be paying attention to who is going to take their place. If it is not going to be you, then you had better like the people who are waiting in the wings. Vinvent Bevins - If We Burn

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as 'wild'. Only to the white man was Nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Chief Standing Bear from The Nutmeg's Curse by Amitav Ghosh

7) Weak chimneys broken off at roofline. Waves on small ponds, water turbid with mud. Unprovoked assaults on neighbours. Large static charges built up on windows, mirrors, television screens.The Scale of Intensity - Don Paterson

You can fail to understand all the details about the coffee mug. And you can understand everything there is about the empty set. I'm still happier if you tell me you're going to throw the empty set at my head than if you tell me you're going to throw the coffee mug at my head. Sean Carroll talking to Robinson Erhardt about mathematical realism

Once scientists knew the diameter of a typical atom, they could estimate the number of atmos in the typical human body. That number? 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. It means that the atoms in a human body are far, far more numerous than the sand grains on all the beaches of the Earth; than [all] the leaves and needles on all the trees of the Earth's forests. Waves in an Impossible Sea - Matt Strassler

Today mankind's true experience of itself has no place in economics. Our standard economic theories are based on a fictional character whose foremost characteristic is that he isn't a woman. One would think that economists would devote themselves to finding solutions for the very complex problems that mankind is facing. Instead they stare blindly at their own assumptions about a masculine nature that not even men possess. We govern the world from a place of not knowing who we are. - Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner - Katrine Marçal

At a certain point in his career the artist G, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was more enthusiastic than ever, and G was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honours that people seemed disposed to offer him almost no matter what he did. The Parade - Rachel Cusk

If you ask me how I remember the island, what it was like to be stranded there by misadventure for nearly three months, I would answer that it was a time and landscape of the mind if I did not have the visible signs to summon its materiality: my journal, the cat, the newspaper cuttings, the curiosity of my friends; and my sisters - how they always look at me, I think, as one returned from the dead. Robinson - Muriel Spark