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Crisis Book Quotes

@crisisbookquotes.bsky.social
5 followers 4 following 21 posts

Repository of radical socio-ecological and new left book quotes. Ran by a Gen Z climate-biodiversity scientist (main: @crisisdiary.bsky.social). dm for submissions.

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Reposted by Crisis Book Quotes
Crisis Diary @crisisdiary.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Coz they are all share one ultimate goal They appeal to different voter culture But they all ultimately pursue the neoliberal agenda; consume everything for elite profit, people and planet, just like in america Follow the money to the atlas network Read ‘Invisible Doctrine’📚💙 vote green/your🗳️
THE INVISIBLE DOCTRINE

A book by: 

George
Monbiot
Peter
Hutchinson
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
“Modern society [is] a civilization that [...] speaks endlessly of making people “happy”, but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy. This ‘modern samsara’ carefully nurtures us with a consumer machine that needs to keep us greedy.” Sogyal Rinpoche 📚💙
"I have encountered no book on the interplay of life and death that is more comprehensive, practical, and wise."
-HUSTON SMITH, author of The World's Religions
THE TIBETAN BOOK OFLINING
AND DYING
Sogyal Rinpoche
THE SPIRITUAL CLASSIC
AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan book of Living and Dying 📚💙
Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists. And to think that all this springs from a civilization that claims to
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
I love this perspective. The fossil fuel industry itself is profiting off of the abundant, wild, biodiversity of earths past. It is burning the productivity of a living planet gone by, in order to kill the productivity of this one. The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen 📚💙
When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime. The solar power is stored in chemical bonds, and the carbon dioxide released from the
flames is the same that the tree inhaled to synthesize its sugars
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Reposted by Crisis Book Quotes
Crisis Diary @crisisdiary.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Sometimes IV, Mary Oliver.
N.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
"Cultural approaches to human experiences like love and death has profound effects on the social order. ‘The political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of the nation.’ " James Baldwin, through James K Row, in Radical Mindfulness 📚💙
How different cultures approach human experiences such as love and death has a profound effect on the resulting social order they produce. "The political institutions of any nation," writes Baldwin, "are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of the nation."
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
“You still don't know how hopeless your cause itself is. You still don't know that the enemy isn't so much outside your soldiers as within them” Krishna, the Bhagavad Gita But could be me talking to my centrist friend who cant see that green growth overconsumption is still overconsumption 📚💙
You still don't know how hopeless your cause itself is. You still don't know that the enemy isn't so much outside your soldiers as within them.
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
"Changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will never be sufficient to produce a healthier society. Only addressing the deeper fears [/confusions] can accomplish that." James Baldwin, through Eddie Glaude, through James K Rowe. Perhaps the most important crisis book quote I have found so far 📚💙
For example, in his recent book Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie Glaude Jr. quotes Baldwin's death-denial thesis from The Fire Next Time and deploys existential analysis to note how
"changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will never be sufficient to produce a healthier society. Only addressing the deeper fears can accomplish that.”
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
“in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas” 100 years of Solitude 📚💙
they transported bunches of bananas. Trying to flee from the nightmare, José Arcadio Segundo dragged himself from one car to another in the direction in which the train was head-ing, and in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas. He recognized only a
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
“We have made some progress, despite our near fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations” ~ Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons. 📚💙 A suprisingly eco hard scifi series: exploring supremacy, extractivism, and consumption of nature and human bodies. And which i painted the first book:
Copy of Hyperion with the pages of the book painted to represent the story. The 6 pilgrims, and their stories, following “the Shrike” along a blood red sunset on Hyperion. The priest’s, the colonel’s, the poet’s, the scholar’s, the detective’s, and the diplomat’s tale, in order of the story. Painted onto the ‘belly’ of the book (the pages opposite the spine)
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
“When we plot this data over time, we see that global GPI grew along with GDP until the mid-1970s, but since then has flattened out and even declined, as the social and environmental costs of growth have become significant enough to cancel out consumption-related gains.” Less is More 💙📚
So it's clear that the relationship between GDP and human welfare breaks down after a certain point. But there is also something else interesting about this relationship. Past a certain threshold, more growth actually begins to have a negative impact. We can see this effect when we look at alternative metrics of progress, like the Genuine Progress Indicator. GPI starts with personal consumption expenditure (which is also the starting point for GDP) and adjusts for income inequality as well as the social and environmental costs of economic activity. By accounting for the costs as well as the benefits of growth, this measure gives us a more balanced view of what's happening in an economy. When we plot this data over time, we see that global GPI grew along with GDP until the mid-1970s, but since then has flattened out and even declined, as the social and environmental costs of growth have become significant enough to cancel out consumption-related gains.!?
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
“[What drives the polycrisis] Corporations adopt an extractivist attitude; states compete against each other; and too few of us have the ethical stamina to [change habits] underneath them all—or at least animating many of them—is simply the deep proclivity to over-consume material resources”
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
“Take the beef industry: Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef […] is the single greatest driver of deforestation. Yet […] accounts for only 2% of the calories […] could be radically scaled down without any loss to human welfare.” 📚💙 Less is More #climate #biodiversity #degrowth
Take the beef industry, for instance. Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef - either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.' It's one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient. And the pressure to find land for pasture and feed is the single greatest driver of deforestation. As I write this, large parts of the Amazon rainforest are literally being burned down for the sake of beef. Yet, far from being essential to human diets, beef accounts for only 2% of the calories humans consume. In most cases the industry could be radically scaled down without any loss to human welfare.
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
“after a certain point growth begins to become 'uneconomic: […] growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability, and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, and ill health” 📚💙 Less is More #booksky #climatecrisis
As the ecologist Herman Daly has put it, after a certain point growth begins to become 'uneconomic: it begins to create more
'illth' than wealth. We can see this happening on a number of fronts: the continued pursuit of growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability, and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, ill health from pollution, diabetes and heart disease, and
so on.
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
“Know what is Enough” “Know when to Stop” “This is how to last a long time.” 📚💙 the Tao te Ching. #booksky Is this advice for the person (sufficiency happiness) or the society (sustainability)?
Ming yu shen shu ch in Name or body: which is closer?
Body or possessions: which means more?
Gain or loss: which one hurts?
Extreme love exacts a great price.
Many possessions entail heavy loss.
Know what is enough—
Abuse nothing.
Know when to stop—
Harm nothing.
This is how to last a long time.

名與身孰親
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
“Inequality makes people feel that the material goods they have are inadequate. […] people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies” 💙📚 Less is More, how degrowth will save the world
Something similar happens when it comes to consumption.
Inequality makes people feel that the material goods they have are inadequate. We constantly want more, not because we need it but because we want to keep up with the Joneses. The more our friends and neighbours have, the more we feel that we need to match them just to feel like we're doing OK. The data on this is clear: people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies. We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Hyperion is an intense and poetic attack of permagrowth capitalism at the cost of everything, that deserves a resurgence in these times. It is no coincidence that, in the seven pilgrims to the Shrike’s death church outside of time, there is both a Jewish and a Palestinian man… #booksky 📚💙 #scifi
A depiction of the Shrike
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Lynn Demarest @lynndemarest.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
As Vonnegut said, human beings will become the only species that failed to save itself because it wasn't economically feasible.
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Crisis Book Quotes @crisisbookquotes.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
I did, Crisis Book Quotes says hello world
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Crisis Diary @crisisdiary.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
The commonly accepted idea that the world can just ‘become a more service economy’ to reduce its planetary destruction is founded on lies. The rich imperial economies that have become most service based have INCREASED their consumption of the planet, not decreased.
As it turns out, the much-celebrated shift to services has delivered no improvements at all when it comes to the resource intensity of rich nations. Services represent 74% of GDP in high-income nations, having grown rapidly since deindustrialisation began in the 1990s, and yet the material use of high-income nations is outpacing GDP growth. Indeed, while high-income nations have the highest share of services in terms of contribution to GDP, they also have the highest per capita material footprints. By far. The same is true on a global scale. Services have grown from 63% of GDP in 1997 to 69% in 2015, according to World Bank data. Yet during this same period global material use has accelerated. In other words, we have seen a rematerial-isation of the global economy even as we have shifted to services.
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