“If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“From a balanced reading of the Ten Commandments, we can only assume that God would prefer you to have gay sex than to covet your neighbor’s oxen. If you’d had a terrible day at work and had to do some sinning, just to unwind, the Commandments are clear about which sin is considered more unholy. “God, I’ve had a terrible day at work; I’ve got to let off some steam. Either I’m going to have sex with Terry or I’m going to covet my neighbor’s oxen.” “What?! No, you mustn’t do that; you better go hang out with Terry.” “Thank you, Lord. I’m going to slide my erect penis right up Terry’s anus.” “Fair enough, my son; I don’t really have a policy on that. I will ask, though, that you don’t look over next door’s fence at them grazing oxen, then imagine in your mind, ‘What would it be like if those oxen were my oxen?’ Don’t do that, will you?” “I won’t. I’m going to empty myself into Terry, then put my mouth over his rect—” “Okay! Do what you’ve gotta do! Just remember: Those are not your oxen!”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Eckhart Tolle says, “Addiction begins with pain and ends with pain,” meaning that pain is behind compulsive behavior. Eleven years clean, I still feel the urge to medicate pain. Whenever events don’t go my way, my first instinct is to annul the feeling, to look for an external resource to solve the problem. The second part of Eckhart’s edict kicks in here—addiction “ends with pain.” Medication of any kind offers only a temporary solution; it always leads back to pain and becomes therefore predictably cyclical.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“In the U.S., the 400 richest people have as much as 185 million people, over 60 percent of the population. As absurd as that is, on a global scale, the richest 85 people have as much as 3.5 billion people, half of humanity!”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“If you can be free from pride, self-pity, self-centeredness, selfishness, jealousy, envy, intolerance, impatience, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, arrogance, and dishonesty, then there is a state of serenity and connectedness within.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The truth is: there is on this frequency, from our human perspective, a planet, some beings, some resources; would it not be sensible to employ systems that benefit the planet, the beings, and the resources?”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“If you feel how I felt, I have been taught a few techniques that might help you. Here’s one for a kick-off: You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life. Even me with my story of one nan that I love and another that I don’t—that story is being used to maintain a certain perspective of mine, a perspective that justifies the way I am, and by justifying the way I am I ensure that I stay the same. I’m no longer interested in staying the same; I’m interested in Revolution, that means I have to go back and change the story of my childhood.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The most potent tool in maintaining the status quo is our belief that change is impossible.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“We have been segregated and severed, from each other and even from ourselves. We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Christianity, Islam and Judaism, the dominant faiths in our culture, were devised to guide people living in very different circumstances to our own – put simply, deserts. How do the teachings of Christ or Abraham or Muhammad help us in the modern, post-industrial, secular world? Not to say these stories are totally obsolete; there’s some terrific advice in all of them. Primarily, though, they have become tools for oppression, segregation and conflict. The aspects of these ideologies that testify against oppression, segregation and conflict, which would seem to be the most vital bits, are consistently ignored.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in scientifically proven fact, not a democracy. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites.” This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don’t even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you’ll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The next industrial revolution is toward decentralized, autonomous, and resilient systems where individuals and communities control their own destinies. This requires a transformation of our economic model from privatized control to co-operative models of ownership, which the social technologies of the Internet can facilitate.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected. We want union, we want connection, we need it the way we need other forms of nutrition, and denied it we delve into the lower impulses for sanctuary.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn’t worry too much about it.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The economy is just a metaphorical device, it's not real-that's why it's got the word "con" in the middle of it.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Be the change you wish to see in the world,” said Gandhi. If you want a nonviolent world, you cannot use violence to achieve it. He also said, “In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The world is awash with colours unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The nation state is a relatively modern idea, and I don’t think we’re getting a lot out of it except for flags and World Cups.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Maybe a life of devotion doesn’t need to be robes and chanting; maybe it’s just going through life with open eyes and an open mind, looking out for chances to help people and buzz on the altruistic zip it gives, like coins in Mario Land.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannised or anaesthetised into compliance.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The reason they don’t explain this to us is because they know that if we find out the extraordinary lengths that they’re going to to fuck us over, we will overthrow the current system and replace it with something fair. That’s why all this important stuff is made to seem inaccessible, boring, and abstract. That is why our participation in politics has been sanded down into an impotent nub. Stick your “X” into this box and congratulate yourself on being free.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn’t relinquish its lessons”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I’ve come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
Russell Brand
Born place: in Grays, Essex, England, The United Kingdom
Born date June 4, 1975
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“unknown to everyone but Deborah, I was a twisted homicidal sicko myself.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dexter in the Dark
“God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.”
― Simon Singh, quote from Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem
“Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.' ...'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered—as it still is in many quarters— an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere “escapism.” “Of course it is escapist,” he cried. “That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape—and take as many with him as he can.” He went on to explain, “The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible.”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, quote from The Paradise War
“The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value”
― Seth Godin, quote from The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
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The Best and the Bri...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
