Tom Hodgkinson quotes - page 2

To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter. (Tom Hodgkinson)
One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic! View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Facebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg's fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun? View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather. (Tom Hodgkinson)
There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for staring into space for hours on end, I decided to put in some proper practice. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as "employee satisfaction results" - might improve. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Indolence of course is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own I hate them with a passion. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside. (Tom Hodgkinson)
These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: "What do you do?" is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn't it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off? View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
It is a common myth that idlers are incapable of working. The term "idler” is used as a pejorative by the forces of dullness and authority as they like the idea that idleness equates to evil, and they want society at large to despise the idler. The non-idler cannot understand the paradox of the working idler. He likes things to be simple: you are either working, or not working. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson
We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment. View quote
Tom Hodgkinson