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"For fast-acting relief, try slowing down." -Lily Tomlin

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"We have done better at playing according to the men's rules than changing them to our own." -Susan Estrich

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"A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most supercolossal of our supercargo planes don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable." -Carl Sandburg

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"My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants." -J. Brotherton

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"Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people before me have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point this out. The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners." -Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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"If my explorations of the food chain have taught me anything, it's that it is a food chain, and all the links in it are in fact linked: the health of the soil to the health of the plants and animals we eat to the health of the eater, in body as well as mind. ... Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people." -Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

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"In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper." -Barack Obama [emphasis mine]

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"When Carleton was three months old, Henry had realized that they'd misunderstood something. Babies weren't babies, they were land mines, bear traps, wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes not even a noise, but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep." -Kelly Link in her amusing short story, "Stone Animals"

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"You cannot remember the weight of your son, nestled for the first time on your belly, his umbilical cord still pulsing, or the way his newborn head smelled like something that belonged to you. You can't recall, because now there is only this: when you press your nose into his blond hair, your boy smells of cut grass and shampoo and vanilla cookies. He squirms from your arms and runs naked across the lawn toward the hose. He wrestles with the spigot, and water splashes his knees. You can't help staring at his little body, so lithe and agile, frog belly floating out in front. You watch him squat to inspect a June bug and then race toward the garden. When he flops down on the grassy path, where wildflowers flutter like prayer flags, you lie down next to him and feel the earth spin. You cannot remember giving birth now."
-"The Things You Forget" by Christina Rosalie Sbarro, from The Sun's August issue

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"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?" -Pablo Casals

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"We are all the same people, all of us. You're no different than I am. Our love is the same. When someone says, 'You can have a contract, and you'll still have insurance, and you'll get all that,' it sounds to me like saying, 'Well, you can sit there, you just can't sit there.'" -Ellen DeGeneres

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"It isn't only our food is travelling great distances to reach us; we, too, have moved a great distance from our food. This most intimate nourishment, this stuff of life--where does it come from? Who produces it? How do they treat their soil, crops, animals? How do their choices--my choices--affect my neighbors and the air, land, and water that surround us? If I knew where my food and drink came from, would I still want to eat it? If even my daily bread has become a mystery, might that total disconnection be somehow linked to the niggling sense that at any moment the apocalyptic frogs might start falling from the sky?" -J.B. MacKinnon

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"Man is born free and everywhere is in chain stores." -Graffiti as quoted in The 100 Mile Diet by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon

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"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more noble than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump." -David Ormsby-Gore

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"It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape."
-Michael Pollan, on working out at the gym, in The New York Times Magazine's April 20, 2008 article "Why Bother?"

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"Sit at the feet of the master long enough, and they'll start to smell." -John Sauget

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"Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject." -Michael Pollan

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"For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically-minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction. It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within."
-Rachel Carson in an op-ed letter to the Washington Post, 1952

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"Why are so many Americans so unhappy ... ? All manner of plausible causes present themselves, but the master cause may be the most elemental: Homo sapiens, a familial animal like the wolf or hyena rather than the solitary like the bear, is genetically unequipped to live without the emotional support of uncles, aunts, first cousins, and second cousins, in addition to siblings, parents, and children ... Periodic gatherings for the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death; the much more frequent celebration of birthdays, name days, anniversaries, and seasonal feasts; as well as webs of less-formal socializing, all serve to keep the machinery of human families in working order. That is how people live all over the world in village, town, or city -- but not in contemporary America."
-Edward N. Luttwak