Philip James Bailey Quotes

One cannot live in society and be free from society.

Let us turn elsewhere, to the wasps and bees, who unquestionably come first in the laying up of a heritage for their offspring.

Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

I'd like to start some form of city-type commune.

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people's lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it 'easing the Spring.'

It's lovely having grass and trees and flowers(Of course, at times, mosquitoes are a pest).Yes, life is life out here in Rangely Towers(Of course Some People like the city best)!

The little bee returns with evening's gloom, To join her comrades in the braided hive, Where, housed beside their might honey-comb, They dream their polity shall long survive.

The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.

And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express

For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.

Marriage is a plastic flower - marriage is an institution. And who wants to live in an institution?

For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.

I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.

I love being in cities with lots of other people, because I'm reminded that there are billions of people like me, and we are each stuck inside of our minds, feverishly trying to crawl out to make connections with other people.