“Since the sheets were half-flown the sails instantly split at the seams, the maintopsail shaking so furiously that the masthead must have gone had not Mowett, the bosun, Bonden, Warley the captain of the maintop and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on the ice-coated yard and cut the sail away close to the reefs.
Warley was on the lee yardarm when the footrope gave way under him and he fell, plunging far clear of the side and instantly vanishing in the terrible sea.”
Source: The Far Side of the World
“Hollom was going forward along the larboard gangway: Nagel, an able seamen but one of the most sullen, bloody-minded and argumentative of the Defenders, was coming aft on the same narrow passage. They were abreast of one another; and Nagel walked straight on without the slightest acknowledgement other than a look of elaborate unconcern.”
Source: The Far Side of the World
“So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.”
Source: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
“We take for granted the shape of our world and the position of the continents— the familiar geography that seems as eternal as the order of the planets. But this arrangement is temporary: it isn't how the planet has been and it isn't how it will be.”
Source: The Ends of the World
“The transformation we need in order to stay below 1.5 C or even 2 C of warming may not be politically possible today. But we are the ones who determine what will be politically possible tomorrow.”
Source: The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
“It is!
“It is evolution,” the garden cried,
“It is revolution,” the nature sighed,
“It is diabolically dark,” the night feared,
“It is unbearably hot,” the Sun cried, but no one cared,
“It is a leafless and lifeless spring,” the seasons implored,
“It is polluting me,” the river sobbed, but it was ignored,
“It is no longer blue, my hue,” the sky admitted,
“It is I who supports you and it is me who is being resented,”
“It is no longer cold,” screamed the north pole,
“It is from me that you all my bounties stole,”
“It is no more like the sea it used to be,
It is no more the water where we felt at home,” said the fish swimming in the dying sea,
“It is not what it had to be,
It is not where humanity had to be,
It is so unfortunately, and this is how it is now,
It is the new reality: the dying sea, the dark sky, the burning sun, and in it all of us now,
It is the question for all of us though, where shall we go without them?
It is not about either us or either them,
It is more about what is right and what is true,
And it is a fact, the sky is dark and diabolically blue!”
Said I, to whoever was listening,
Alas, they were busy pleasing the moments of life, filled with callous hastening!”
Source: They Loved in 2075!
“It has taken about four billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the Eden that makes our lives possible, and less than a century for us to destabilize those rhythms.”
“If I seem to you to change my state and alter my condition, I do not change my mind. I try always to be Hutten, never to desert myself, but to walk with equanimity through the unequal scenes of life.”
Source: Ulrich von Hutten and the German Reformation
“Instead of a President whom he'd never see and or representatives he'd never meet, the peasant had a single lord. This lord was a local master whom he knew by sight even though he had no television or newspaper. This proximity allowed for an organic familiarity between ruler and ruled. They were not "on a first name basis," of course, but they were acquainted in the sense that they could be rightly considered "neighbors," even if they were not equals. This organic familiarity meant that the peasant paid his taxes in person, complained in person, and if need be he hung the lord from a local tree in person.”
Source: The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought
“The latter class [peasants] is always unaffected by the course of historic events. Like cats who are attached to a house and not to the people who dwell in it, the poorer type of peasant belongs less to the nation than to the soil. Therefore, however numerous they are, they never constitute a danger for a conqueror.”
Source: Jeremias, höret die Stimme