Warned Quotes

“A tingling in her spine warned her the path that lay ahead was dangerous, but her curiosity placated her, driving her onward against her instincts.”

“38. “A wet bird never flies at night.” (My grandfather said that to me when I was a child and warned me not to forget it. I remember his words but never did figure out what he meant!)”

“What were the Mechanic's elders like? She had said they were like his own, strange though that sounded. Did they listen to her? Had she passed on the warning, only to have her elders dismiss her words as Alain's elders had dismissed his?He suddenly felt certain that this Mechanic had no choice but to go onward to danger. Once again, he knew how she must feel. A strange sensation, worrisome. How to make it go away? How to release the hold she had placed upon him?She had saved his life. Alain almost smiled before he caught himself. That was it. Several times she had "helped" him. The Mechanic had used that to influence him. No wonder the elders warned against helping. How to cancel it out? Like cancelled like. Power could defeat power. She had saved him, she had helped him. He would help her, perhaps even save her life. That would cancel whatever the Mechanic had done to him. He would be free of her. The logic had no flaws.”

“Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism.He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment.This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life.”

“When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation.”

“(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and "imaginative death."And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral."But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!”

“We are the anarchists your parents warned you about.”

“We are the people our parents warned us about.”

“You're playing with fire," she warned him."That's how I know I'm alive.”