Bivans Quotes & Sayings

I picked up The Hobbit. And I began to read. I was swept off to a green, green Shire in a far, far land, and my soul has never returned. I suppose it never will. Yes, my soul at the time wandered more in the smoking wastelands of Mordor or the Dead Marshes than Hobbiton, but wandering in Middle Earth, was superior to my own world in every way. — Steve Bivans

This is more like the scientists I know. Authority outweighs evidence, at least for as long as the authority lives. — Frans De Waal

Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault. We chant in unison. Who led them on? She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. — Margaret Atwood

We live in a drug culture! Drugs are everywhere and touted as the panacea for every ailment in our society. We have drugs for hyper children, drugs for depression - some of the most insidious drugs ever - , drugs for allergies, drugs for acne, drugs for emphysema and drugs for erectile disfunction - maybe the most useful of them all. And let's not forget the side effects of these wonder drugs! It's cliche to even talk about drug advertisements and the laundry list of side effects tacked onto the end of them, usually rattled off at warp speed by someone on loan from the local auction house. I've seen ads for acne medicines that include side effects that are potentially fatal! Seriously? "Hey! Buy our Acne-Magic Drug! You'll have crystal clear skin! In your coffin!" What the hell is wrong with us? — Steve Bivans

Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

We need to return to harmony with Nature and with each other, to become what humans were destined to be, builders of gardens and Shires, hobbits (if you will), not Masters over creatures great and small. — Steve Bivans

Want to enjoy an restful day? Wake up, turn your phone on, meditate, look at the sky - then toss your phone into the bushes. — Waylon H. Lewis

Much of our Fear, is based in the fear of loss. We fear losing our own lives. We fear death for our family and friends. We fear the loss of our means of survival. In the Western World that's tied up in the way we make money to support ourselves and families. In many parts of the World, it's more basic: food and water. We fear violence, oppression. We fear others. — Steve Bivans

As bad as we humans abuse Nature, I personally don't think we can 'kill' her. She does not belong to us, we belong to her, and she can kick us to the curb in an instant, if ever she's of a mind to do so. She is laughing at us and our arrogance, and could squash us like a bug at any moment. Our trinkets and technologies are curiosities to her, nothing more. They are like flashes of light: here and gone in an instant, like Sauron's Ring was in the hands of Bombadil. — Steve Bivans

Yes, at some point, billions of years from now, the Earth will be destroyed by the sun, or bombarded into a rock by asteroids or a comet, but I suspect that we will be long gone by then, if we haven't figured out how to live more harmoniously, and found a way to Star Trek our asses into the Milky Way to find a new home. Hopefully, we'll learn our lesson before we do, or ole Tom Bombadilo will just be laughing at us again, on a different rock, spinning around a different sun, watching us play with our magic techno-ring-trinkets. — Steve Bivans

Food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity. — Louise Fresco

The power of words to deceive is a danger far exceeding any we might encounter from physical weapons. Sticks and stones can break bones! But words can lead worlds into ruin! — Steve Bivans

Frodo did not destroy the Ring; Gollum did. This is something he would always be reminded of, especially since the very finger that bore the Ring was missing. In the end Frodo had failed. His will was not strong enough to complete the deed. However, it is doubtful if anyone else could have completed it either. The great King Isildur had failed in the same spot at the Cracks of Doom. No one else had even attempted it, nor were they willing to try; only Frodo had the courage to carry the burden to the fire. For lacking the strength to throw it in we should forgive him. — Steve Bivans

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships. — Harriet Lerner

Have you ever been in a great mood, or at least a good one, then decided, "You know what, I'm going to troll through Facebook and see what's happening with my friends."? I have.

I shouldn't though. It's a disco strangler of good days. It's the Ted Bundy of good moods. One minute you're cruising along and the next you're chained in a moldy hole in someone's basement, waiting to be transformed into some psycho's personal Halloween mask, metaphorically speaking, mind you. — Steve Bivans

In order to get to the fruit of the tree, you have to go out on a limb. — Shirley Maclaine

Which epitaph would you choose for your grave-stone: "He made lots of money." or "He saved the Earth"? And don't think I'm being sarcastic, because for once, I'm not. We're all going to die. What will be your legacy? Smaug-loads of money? or Saving the Earth? It's your choice. — Steve Bivans

It's time to step back and reexamine our hatred and let wrath subside. Are we striking out against the real problems: ignorance, fear, want, greed, and political disenfranchisement or just trying to find the most immediate scapegoat on which to lay the blame? Are we so busy blaming our fellow Hobbits that we've forgotten who is really behind the fouling of our Shire? Are we personally guilty of greed? Most of us are, to an extent. We need to reexamine our own desires, and make sure they are really needs instead of just wants. Poverty could be wiped out world wide, if enough modern Hobbits just said, "No! We will not stand for it anymore," or if those at the top of the economic ladder really wanted to do so. — Steve Bivans

People interest me so much. They're such wonderful puzzles. Think of it. Half the time we've no idea what we're doing, but we live anyway. — Paula McLain

The argument that the chemical and drug companies often make, to counter the growing movement of natural or alternative medicine is similar to my warning about kissing cobras. They will say things like, "Not all things natural are good for you" and "Even walking to the bathroom in the morning carries risks!" They then trot out extreme, obvious examples like drinking hemlock, or kissing cobras, people falling down stairs in their house, and the like. Okay Mr. Chemicalman, some natural things can kill you, like CEOs of chemical companies who poison almost everything they touch with their products? That's assuming of course that CEOs are natural. — Steve Bivans

After ripping through The Hobbit, I read The Lord of the Rings, and the darkness of that story enveloped me in a way that is impossible to explain. I was THERE, in a very real sense. The fear was palpable in the presence of the black-cloaked Ringwraiths, and I could taste the sulfurous fumes of Mt. Doom. I could smell the sweat of horses and hot leather and hear the clash of battle as I rode with the Rohan on the fields of the Pelennor. I bled and died with the sun-king, Theoden. I rose again with Eowyn's defiance of the Witch King. I soared with the Eagles as they swept the broken and bloody body of Frodo and his companion Samwise the Brave from the smoking crags of the fiery mountain. There has never been such a story, and I don't think there ever shall be again. — Steve Bivans

WE the people, whether acting out of 'fear factors' or intelligence, are saying that we will not buy your products anymore. We are tired of being lied to, bamboozled, and poisoned. If you can't honestly tell us what's in your products then there is only one 'scientific' and logical conclusion we can come to: YOU have something to HIDE. And that's all we need to know when we pull out our wallets. — Steve Bivans

We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing - life, sex, Forrest Gump. — Marisha Pessl

Let's put our money where our mouth is; let's invest in the future by investing in the education of our youth and the re-education of those who need it and aren't so young anymore. It's not charity; it's an investment in the mental, intellectual, and social infrastructure of our country and our planet. Charity is something you give to corporations when they commit crimes of fraud and plunge the world into economic turmoil. — Steve Bivans

I think that the root of Willful Ignorance, is Fear. We'll return to that in a minute. But the root of Fear, is Simple Ignorance, at least I think that our original Fear is rooted in simply not understanding the World around us: not knowing. — Steve Bivans

During a Facebook discussion awhile back, I posted something to the effect that we didn't need GMOs and that no one did. While this was a generalization, I refused to retract it when a friend of a friend argued that I shouldn't speak for everyone, and that we shouldn't, "throw out the baby with the bathwater." I would argue that the last thing we need on this planet, is a lot of two-headed babies. Toss the water, and whatever's in it. GMOs simply have not, and I would argue further, probably never will be demonstrated to be safe, and we do not need them. — Steve Bivans

I had hit on the most positive solution to the world's most negative problems. What we needed were a bunch of little, hairy Hobbits! Not large armies of Gondoreans and Rohirrim, just beer drinking, song-singing, riddle-solving, barrel-riding, pipe-weed-smokin', second-breakfast-eatin', long-walkin' Hobbits! — Steve Bivans

You know what I really love the most in life? Food. Yep, just food. I love the cooking of food, the eating of food, the talking about food, the thinking about food, and the dreaming about food. Food, food, food. That's what I love. Can there be anything more Hobbity than that? I reckon not. — Steve Bivans

I don't care what tomorrow brings, as long as I have you. — Molly Harper

What's interesting is that most free-marketers don't seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that's trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar - that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations - with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools. — Steve Bivans

But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the ocean - unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. — Neal Stephenson

With what characters she had filled this lost stage of emptiness! It was here that she would see the people of her imagination, the fierce figures of her making, as they strolled from corner to corner, brooded like monsters or flew through the air like seraphs with burning wings, or danced, or fought, or laughed, or cried. This was her attic of make-believe, where she would watch her mind's companions advancing or retreating across the dusty floor. — Mervyn Peake

Light at the end of the tunnel? We don't even have a tunnel; we don't even know where the tunnel is. — Lyndon B. Johnson

We owe it to the victims of the suicide bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005 to find out how the attacks happened and to learn the lessons that will spare lives in the future. — Pauline Neville-Jones

A mistake that a lot of people make, and I've been guilty of this as well, is that we assume that just because something is natural it is therefore safe, and ergo, good for us. I like to point out that cobras are natural too, but I don't want to kiss one. — Steve Bivans

I swear, they need to make an app for Facebook that has little electrodes hooked up to our private parts, so when we see some idiot spouting off about something he really doesn't know jack shit about, as soon as we reach for the keyboard, it sends 110 volts coursing through our dis-functioning erectiles, or better yet, through HIS, before he posts it to begin with. — Steve Bivans

I am a Hobbit, like I said at the beginning of the book. That doesn't mean that at times, many times, I wasn't a Dwarf, an Orc, even a bit Gollum-ish or Wraith-ish. But deep down, what I want to be is a Hobbit. Do you? — Steve Bivans

Negativity is a sucking whirlpool of piss. — Steve Bivans

If you have to wear a hazmat suit to raise crops, why would you ever eat them? If you're afraid of getting that crap on your skin, how much more insane would it be to put it in your mouth! Seriously? I often wonder, and I wish someone would research it if they haven't already, whether the CEOs of Monsanto, Dupont, etc., eat GMO products and feed them to their families, or if they send out their 'personal shoppers' to the local farmer's market to bring home fresh, organic produce every week? I suspect the latter. I'm quite sure they all have reverse osmosis water systems in their mansions. Let me put it bluntly, if I haven't been clear so far. The day the CEO of Monsanto guzzles a gallon of Roundup, is the day I'll consider buying their products, maybe. — Steve Bivans