One lives as if one might miss out on something.
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.
We need to claim lunch back. It is our natural right. It has been stolen from us by our rulers. The fear that keeps you chained to your desk, staring at your screen, does not serve your spirit. Lunch...
It's easier to robe the poor.
It seems no body's business to try to better things
Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we...
We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Off...
Their contemplation seems to reconnect us with a childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries of the universe. They are literally other-worldly, and so remove us from the world and its cares; they lift...
[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the che...
We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a b...
Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
The dogma of hard work—which is deeply embedded in contemporary notions of what it means to be American—is what keeps us toiling and keeps us happy to be exploited in this way.
It’s hard to drift off into nowhereland when your arousal hormones are circulating wildly as a result of your rage at mobile-phone users. Fantasies of hurling their mobile phones from the train window...
It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed.
What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old...
The tempo of modern life is such that we are giving less and less time and thought to the matter of cooking and feeding . . . it is a pretty crazy life when one eats to work and does not work in order...
Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We sho...
Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane experiences which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That’s not really li...
Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we ar...