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Apr 27

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought morally, to do it. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. From the moral point of view, the prevention of the starvation of millions of people outside our society must be considered at least as pressing as the upholding of property norms within our society.” Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

Apr 13

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”

“Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.”

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

Apr 12

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.”

“It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — “Always do what you are afraid to do.” Heroism

Apr 11

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” R.W.E.

Mar 8

“Am I arguing that girls and women shouldn’t be held responsible for their behaviour? Not at all. If a woman drinks to excess, then falls over in the street, loses her wallet and vomits all over her shirt, she has only herself to blame. But rape is not a consequence of getting drunk. It’s a consequence of a man deciding to rape someone.” Emily Maguire, Princesses & Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity.

Feb 25

“I am not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I’m going to take a stand. I’m going to defend it. Right or wrong, I’m going to defend it.” Cameron, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Feb 8

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.” Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (via alwaysinventing)

“Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.” Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Feb 7

“I am patient with stupidity but not those who are proud of it.” Edith Sitwell, I Live Under a Black Sun

“What It’s Like To Hit an Old Man in the Head With a Gun”
“It’s like anything else. You ever check out a library book? Or buy something at a store? Or jump off some steps into a lake? It’s just something that happens in time and space; you do it and then it’s done. Except in this specific instance, you happen to have a crumpled person at your feet getting smears of blood on the dusty linoleum floor. But it’s not like you’ve changed. You’re still you, in your same body. You can still spell. The basic society of your brain is still the same. You’re breathing. People do things. Things happen all the time.” Patterns of Paper Monsters

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