Jay Griffiths Quotes

25 quotes in 456 categories

• A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own
• All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an…
• Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true…
• We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.
• A functional media is as important to democratic freedom as voting.
• As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.
• Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.
• Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite…
• I don't write quickly, and I don't want to.
• If people can't acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that's their loss.
• Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.
• The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.
• The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.
• All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out…
• Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled…
• Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away…
• I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue…
• In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed…
• Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst…
• Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our…

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