an-endless-knot

[an-endless-knot]

“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.”

Alice Koller

[an-endless-knot]

"The price of being one's own self is often the loss of love and approval, which is simply too high a price for most people to pay. On the other hand, the price of conformity is also high: a loss of an authentic sense of self; a loss of authentic relationships with other people; anxiety or neuroses which speak of deep conflict."

Stephanie Dowrick

[an-endless-knot]

The optimistic delusions to which humans are prone do make the quality of human life a little less bad than it otherwise would be. In this way, they partially palliate the human predicament—or at least they do so for those who have them. The quality of life just does not feel quite as bad as it would in the absence of the rose-colored glasses [but] to palliate a predicament is not to elude it. Even armed with various optimistic coping mechanisms, the quality of human life is not only much worse than people think but actually quite awful. This may not be true in every minute or even every hour of (human) life—there are moments of relief and pleasure—but taken as a whole, it is an unenviable condition.

David Benatar

[an-endless-knot]

“In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.”

Ruth Harrison

[an-endless-knot]

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

Plato

[an-endless-knot]

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

Mahatma Gandhi

[an-endless-knot]

"The Constitution ... illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity."

Howard Zinn

[an-endless-knot]

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

[an-endless-knot]

There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging, which has nothing to do with the lives we lead, and I don’t believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it—and almost all of us have one way or another—this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful, and there are two things you can do about it: you can meet the collision head on and try and become what you really are, or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.

James Baldwin

[an-endless-knot]

I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walt Whitman

[an-endless-knot]

"But if you're subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself."

David Foster Wallace

[an-endless-knot]

So much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating effect.

Eleanor Roosevelt

[an-endless-knot]

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.

Peter Singer

[an-endless-knot]

Where would we be without our safe, familiar, American bullshit? Land of the free, home of the brave, the American dream, all men are equal, justice is blind, the press is free, your vote counts, business is honest, the good guys win, the police are on your side, God is watching you, your standard of living will never decline, and everything is going to be just fine—the official national bullshit story. I call it the American Okie-Dokie. Every one of those items is provably untrue at one level or another, but we believe them because they’re pounded into our heads from the time we’re children. That’s what they do with that kind of thing—pound it into the heads of kids, because they know the children are much too young to be able to muster an intellectual defense against a sophisticated idea like that and they know that up to a certain age children believe everything their parents tell them. And, as a result, they never learn to question things. Nobody questions things in this country anymore. Nobody questions it—everybody is too fat and happy. Everybody’s got a cell phone that’ll make pancakes and rub their balls now. We’re way too fucking prosperous for our own good … Americans have been bought off and silenced by toys and gizmos and no one learns to question things.

George Carlin

[an-endless-knot]

"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

Howard Zinn

[an-endless-knot]

"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."

John Wooden

[an-endless-knot]

You don't have a soul ... You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.