“I don’t know how I got to that thinking of not caring what other people think, but it’s a good thing… There’s this Vedic line that goes, ‘Man has control of action alone, never the fruit of that action.’ In other words, you do the best you can and how the thing goes into the world, you can’t control that. It’s lucky when it goes good and it’s gone good for me, and it’s horrible when it goes bad and it’s gone bad for me. Everybody’s had those experiences, but so what? You die two deaths if you’ve sold out and not done what you were supposed to do. You die once because you sold out, and you die twice because it was a failure. Fire Walk with Me didn’t do anything out in the world, but I only died one time with that picture, because I felt good about it. You can live with yourself perfectly fine if you stay true to what you love.”

— David Lynch, Room to Dream

“Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.”

— Octavia Butler

UbuWeb returns:

“In a moment when our collective memory is being systemically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.”

“A $15,000 film is financially unbeatable. Television cannot kill it. The apathy of the audience cannot kill it. Theatrical distributors cannot kill it. It is free.”

— Jonas Mekas on John Cassavetes’s Shadows

“Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.”

— Emily Dickinson

“At the bottom of all this lies a vague stress: people are either nervous, anxious, irritated, or else they are apathetic. They look as if they expect to be hit from an unexpected quarter. Calm and certainty have been replaced by aggression.

It is the stress of people living under a constant threat. It is the stress of people compelled, every day, to deal with absurdity and nothingness.”

— Václav Havel, Stories and Totalitarianism

“I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”

— Ray Bradbury

“One may not make things more clear by talking about them, but one can infect others with the same desire.”

— Virginia Woolf

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“What the Stoics propose is so difficult and vain. The Stoics claim that all those who fall short of the highest degree of wisdom are equally foolish and vicious, as if those who were in two inches of water [were to be called as wet as those right in]. They conclude that what one can sometimes do one can always do, and that, since the desire for glory certainly causes those who have it to do something, they think others could do the same.”

— Blaise Pascal