Tom Hodgkinson Quotes
The terrible thing about the internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need.
The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.
When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.
In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.
My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.
Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.
Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.
The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions.
Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn't it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off?
Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather.
Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing.
Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.
Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.
We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.
Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?
Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.
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.
I don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism.
Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?
I've found that there isn't any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles' songs probably originated in about five minutes.
What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.
One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.
When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.
When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.
We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.
The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.
Faffing of course does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.
Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.
When the day comes, I remember how much I loathe flying. I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks.