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We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Bottom
Numbers
Lines
Beauty
Become
Truth
Knocked
Aside
Obsessed

More quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

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If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
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Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: Time is money. He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Faffing of course does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
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Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane experiences which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?
Tom Hodgkinson
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Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.
Tom Hodgkinson
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I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
Tom Hodgkinson
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One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
Tom Hodgkinson
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Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
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There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.
Tom Hodgkinson