Alan Crawford

Who I'd like to meet:

My favourite quotations:

"Be the change you wish to see in the world" (Gandhi).

"Life's not about avoiding the storm, it's about learning to dance in the rain" (anon)

"And we live in unnatural times. And we must make it natural again, With our singing and our intelligent rage" (Ben Okri)

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life." (Fr. Alfred D'Souza)

"There is no truer truth obtainable by Man than comes of music" (Robert Browning)

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." (Karl Marx)

"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life". (Carl Rogers 1961)

"Blind respect for Authority is the greatest enemy of truth" (Albert Einstein)

"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule." (Samuel Butler)

"...being Goth is seeing beauty, and its coming destruction... appreciation for the darker side of life and art, Goth respects what has been traditionally called feminine values in both men and women, beauty, love, refinement, sensitivity, romance, creativity...it is a statement against what is seen as the oppressive, materialistic, and mundane" (various) “The burden of originality is one that most people don't want to accept. They'd rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they're supposed to like, what they're supposed to buy, and what they're supposed to laugh at." (Marilyn Manson)

"Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves." (George Monbiot, on climate change.)

"Villains make problems and problems are what changes the world. All artists are villains, and that's what I like to be." (Marilyn Manson)

"Conventional political and economic policies are destroying the very foundations of the wellbeing of humans and other animals. Our culture is in the grip of a value system and a way of understanding the world which is fundamentally flawed." (The Green Party)

"While human life, resulting from a series of evolutionary accidents, is arguably meaningless, individual human lives are not. Those accidents have bequeathed an extraordinary degree of consciousness, which in turn has granted us an enhanced capacity for both sympathy and suffering. Using the one to relieve the other invests our lives with a purpose which surely requires no celestial justification. Nor do we need God to tell us to protect other species and beautiful landscapes: we can do so simply because we love them." George Monboit