The collection / 50 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1994 AD

Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.

Russell Brand / quote

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02c. 1994 AD

I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.

Russell Brand / quote

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03c. 1994 AD

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.

Russell Brand / quote

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04c. 1994 AD

Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.

Russell Brand / quote

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05c. 1994 AD

Some people were just getting on with their lives, chatting, being young. It simply wouldn't do.

Russell Brand / quote

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06c. 1994 AD

Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.

Russell Brand / quote

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07c. 1994 AD

This is no time for drinking a mug of water - which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don't drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink... mug of water.

Russell Brand / quote

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08c. 1994 AD

And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.

Russell Brand / quote

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09c. 1994 AD

Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.

Russell Brand / quote

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10c. 1994 AD

Murderers! Stop murdering. Everyone will die eventually. Just sit down and be patient.

Russell Brand / quote

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11c. 1994 AD

I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

Russell Brand / quote

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12c. 1994 AD

I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others.

Russell Brand / quote

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13c. 1994 AD

I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.

Russell Brand / quote

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14c. 1994 AD

A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo...

Russell Brand / quote

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15c. 1994 AD

What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.

Russell Brand / quote

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16c. 1994 AD

We are nature; we are nature as we munch gum and check the phone; we are nature as we queasily regret our imperfection, turning the glossy page, turning our glossy stomachs; we are nature as we hear them witter inanely on the radio, desecrating the silence with the violence of their idiocy and dumb verdicts, chattering and grooming, picking through the ticks in their hair, marveling at new minutia.

Russell Brand / quote

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17c. 1994 AD

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?

Russell Brand / quote

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18c. 1994 AD

The world is awash with colours unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests.

Russell Brand / quote

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19c. 1994 AD

I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!

Russell Brand / quote

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20c. 1994 AD

I don't like doing anything that makes you sweat if you don't come at the end of it.

Russell Brand / quote

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21c. 1994 AD

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

Russell Brand / quote

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22c. 1994 AD

Have you been out in society recently? 'Cause it's SHIT.

Russell Brand / quote

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23c. 1994 AD

We’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard.

Russell Brand / quote

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24c. 1994 AD

People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.

Russell Brand / quote

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