#ali

Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]? ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#double-standards #gender #hypocrisy #immorality #men

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#imagination

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ↗

— George Orwell

#fear-of-the-future #inequality #poverty #society #imagination

I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible. ↗

— Aleksandar Hemon

#individuality #insecurity #imagination

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom. ↗

— Margaret Drabble

#gloom #human #human mind #mind #much

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in. ↗

— Robin Sloan

#imagination #immortality #life #secrets #friendship

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#ethics #morality #nihilism #philosohers #philosophy

The circus had been unlike anything I could ever imagine and I could not walk away. I wanted to be a part of the magic, create it and wield it with such skill that it looked effortless. I wanted to fly. ↗

— Laura Lam

#circus #magic #imagination

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time. ↗

— Robin Wasserman

#digital-identity #digitalization #identity #internet #meta

Wisdom is not guaranteed with age but is realized through one's sensitivity to humanity and the universe ↗

— I. Alan Appt

#philosophy #psychology #self-help #spirituality #age