Upside Quotes - page 7
If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will never be built. The upside is that we don't have to be perfect to save our communities and restore the Earth. We just have to try hard and be as honest as we can be about the processes we are going through. So I share the mistakes and failures, as well as the successes, because that is the truth of my journey – and of anyone's journey.
Van Jones
-I hate a Roman named Status Quo!
Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds.
See the world.
It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.
And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.
To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
Ray Bradbury
Capture of Nanking Rain and a windstorm rage blue and yellow over Chung the bell mountain as a million peerless troops cross the Great River. The peak is a coiled dragon, the city a crouching tiger more dazzling than before. The sky is spinning and the earth upside down. We are elated yet we must use our courage to chase the hopeless enemy. We must not stoop to fame like the overlord Hsiang Yu. If heaven has feeling it will grow old and watch our seas turn into mulberry fields. April 1949.
Mao Zedong
No mathematical idea has ever been published in the way it was discovered. Techniques have been developed and are used, if a problem has been solved, to turn the solution procedure upside down, or if it is a larger complex of statements and theories, to turn definitions into propositions, and propositions into definitions, the hot invention into icy beauty. This then if it has affected teaching matter, is the didactical inversion, which as it happens may be anti-didactical.
Hans Freudenthal
Since the advent of modernism, artists have been seeking to loosen the entanglement of work and subject, because they saw themselves pushed into a role that they did not necessarily want to occupy: one which offered freedom and independence on the upside, but in combination with isolation and powerlessness on the downside. While the workers of the Fordist factory developed collectivist strategies to pursue their goals, the particularities of the artist's existence – cast as productive eccentricity and manic-depressive individualism – made it more difficult for artists to organize to achieve their demands and improve their precarious living and working conditions. It was only with great difficulty that this group, condemned to autonomy, could free itself from the prison of its freedom.
Johannes Grenzfurthner
"The Padayottam military occupation period won't be forgotten by the Malayalis for generations. It was this invasion, between Malayalam era 957 to 967 (1782 to 1792) that turned Malayalam upside down," says P. Raman Menon, biographer of Shaktan Tampuran, the King of Cochin during Tipu's invasion. He adds: "There was hardly any cowshed left in Malayalam where the Mysore Tiger did not enter." The reference is to the mass cow-slaughter carried out by Tipu's army on his orders.
Tipu Sultan
I was kinda torn on-on that. (Donald Trump's announcement he was banning transgender individuals from the US military) I know Congress was looking at it. So maybe he signed a bill they passed or something, but the upside is that the army was refusing to prohibit, you know, big hairy men from going into the ladies' locker room in the Marines, in the army. And I thought, "Well, you know, maybe finally this will cut down on girls in the marines."
Ann Coulter
![That was a very moving and poignant experience. We didn't say much about it beforehand, and we didn't say much about it afterward, because we thought the music said enough. I wanted to do ‘Boot Camp', because that was my favorite song on [Soundgarden's 1996 album] ‘Down On The Upside', so I went and learned it, but the thing with Chris is, he would tune the guitar to his voice, so it's kinda complicated to learn from following YouTube! (Chris Cornell)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/65/chris-cornell-album-boot-1004565.webp)
If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.
Michael Lewis (author)
