mimemo = mini media mokum
mokum is another name for amsterdam – “the most multicultural city in the world”:
“with over 180 nationalities, amsterdam is scoring high marks on diversity.“ – iamsterdam.com (amsterdam’s official portal)
value statement
fostering lifelong learning in the service of sustainability and self-determination
true happiness is not at all expensive …
“Ours is a society in which, through its tyrannical standard of respectability, all the members are goading each other to spoil themselves to the utmost limit of their capacity. […] True happiness is not at all expensive. It depends upon that natural spring of beauty and of life, harmony of relationship.“ – Rabindranath Tagore in “Robbery of the soil” (included in Poet And Plowman by Leonard Elmhirst (Visva-Bharati University, Calcutta 1975), pp. 34 & 36
when retaining one’s childhood love for …
“If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? … I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and … toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.” – George Orwell quoted in Two Cheers for Democracy by E.M. Forster (London: Penguin Books 1976, p. 76)
remember your humanity, and forget the rest
“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.” – Bertrand Russell quoted by Sarah Bakewell in Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope))
a price has to be paid for anything worthwhile
“No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.” – E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (concluding remarks, ch. “Technology with a Human Face”)
