hum

Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.

Lowell Mill Girls

Twenty years ago the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned 17 times the average employee’s pay; now it is more than 75 times.

Toynbee & Walker

Audiophiles have developed incredibly acute – some might say irrelevant – but certainly very impressive auditory skills. They can hear all kinds of details that the rest of us can’t. It’s as if they’ve taught themselves to become irritated by poor audio quality.

The industry is full of people who’ll go for a mechanism before they’ll go with instinct. We’re surrounded by Cambridge double firsts who are pointedly not using what they know. You just have to write with honesty. Emotional truth is the most powerful thing you’ve got.

Paul Abbott

How little we know, how eager to learn.

Sir John Templeton

“I’m selfish. I’ve got all this,” he nods at the view that sweeps past a flank of Scottish scarp. “And I want to keep it. I don’t want to share it with anybody.”

Tom Leppard

“By trying to sing over the sound of the city, birds are risking vocal injury,” said Dr. Sue Anne Zollinger from the University of St Andrews. “This could have serious implications on how fit and attractive they’re perceived to be by females.”

A sorry tale of sex and the single songbird

I have never missed a meditation in 34 years. I meditate once in the morning and again in the afternoon, for about 20 minutes each time. Then I go about the business of my day. And I find that the joy of doing increases. Intuition increases. The pleasure of life grows.

David Lynch
The pleasure of life grows

Here she was abruptly at liberty, thin, exhausted, but full of life and humour, capable of a 20-minute speech of precision and wit and emotion and humility on the Tarmac of a Colombian air base on the outskirts of Bogota.

Rescue in the jungle: the greatest escape