One more: “I have nothing. I owe a lot. The rest I leave to the poor.” Rabelais’ epitaph
Source: Disparate Quotes | ~Burning Woman~
Tales
Sha Tara
Jan 7, 2017
While I’m thinking about stuff with nothing actually sticking in the mind as particularly worthy of another difficult “essay” that says what I want to say but produces little except frustration and dissatisfaction, I thought I’d throw out some disparate quotes from other stuff I’ve read, or some I’ve pretended to read. Let’s have a look…
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. — Alan Watts
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The great fallacy of childhood is the belief that grownups must know what they are doing. There is no evidence for this in the historical record. You would do better by grabbing a government at random from the denizens of a rural high school. Democracy brings us twerps, psychopaths, ambitious ciphers, short men, and well-born drones. They are what they are. They can’t change any more than a leper can change his spots. I need some really strong drugs or someone to hit me on the head with a rubber mallet. Opium is the religion of the masses. Let us pray. – Fred Reed
What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum – no new world system equilibrium…but a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder – Wolfgang Streeck
If Trump’s rise represented an actual substantive rebellion, that at least would suggest a revolution in consciousness. But it’s not that serious. There’s no content behind it. Trump is just a symbol of negation, a big middle finger to the establishment. He’s a TV show for a country transfixed by spectacle. (Sean Illing – Vox)
America was a dictatorship of ideas, a consumerist ethos that propelled the machinery of capitalism through the instrumentalization of popular culture (http://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/27/14038406/donald-trump-frankfurt-school-stuart-jeffries-marxism-critical-theory)
They’d never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love. — Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz.
Resistance starts with plain speaking.
Fake news is propaganda.
The powerful demanding apologies from artists is censorship.
Business dealings while in office are corruption.
Threatening protesters and petitioners is authoritarianism.
Declaring a minority an internal enemy and calling for militarized unity is fascism.
Everything starts with naming these things in public.
(from Adventures and Musings of an Arch Druidess)
I am reading the book of human sins. When I’m done I’ll cast it into the fire and all their sins will be gone. (“The Island” – movie)
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. – Noam Chomsky
Conventions go a long way to validating superiority. If we were all guided by truth alone, none of us could accept anything on face value. We would each become investigative journalist, historian and detective wrapped as one. – Exo-politician, WordPress
It is better to be alone than to become a person that loses his soul to the fear of loneliness. ― Shannon L. Alder
You have to understand that most of the people out there are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so helplessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. (Morpheus, The Matrix)
When love is not madness, it is not love. — Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Not a single star will be left in the night. / The night will not be left. / I will die and, with me, / the weight of the intolerable universe. / I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, / the continents and faces. / I shall erase the accumulated past. / I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. / Now I am looking on the final sunset. / I am hearing the last bird. / I bequeath nothingness to no one — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Suicide”
God’s only excuse is that he does not exist. — Stendhal
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport. — William Shakespeare
You have to be ready to be anyone in moments of danger or love. — Lidia Yuknavitch
[…] there is a human capacity called imagination. It’s the wild card in the deck. It’s the greatest wild card ever known. It is, in fact, the cutting edge of consciousness. It invents new realities. It releases gigantic amounts of buried energy. And it’s entirely an individual proposition. – Jon Rappoport
What could be more free, more independent, more unique, more creative than individual consciousness that has a non-material basis? – Jon Rappoport
…there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards / down to the last bomb, / but as God said, / crossing his legs, / I see where I have made plenty of poets / but not so very much / poetry. — Charles Bukowski
We can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But […] our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t. — Dylan Thomas
I like the Rabelais quote: “I have nothing. I owe a lot. The rest I leave to the poor.”
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