#ali

But democrats are seldom welcome on planets run by totalitarian governments, and scarcely more welcome on planets where anarchy prevails--this is due to the very nature of democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and anarchy. ↗

— Christopher Stasheff

#democracy #totalitarianism #nature

Trouble is we end up being worse at saying things well. It's got to be an inborn fault. Naturally, everyone's got faults. My biggest fault is that the faults i was born with grow bigger each year. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#truth #wisdom #nature

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . . ↗

— Barry Unsworth

#god #morality #power #nature

Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature ↗

— Auguste Rodin

#truth #nature

Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises. ↗

— David Harvey

#capitalism #enigma #harvey #marx #marxist

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia! ↗

— Annie Dillard

#nature #prayer #seeing #spirituality #nature

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us. ↗

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

#materialism #nature

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#morality #nature

ভীতি কখনোই প্রীতির মতো স্থায়ী ফলদায়ক ঔষধ নয়, তবে তাতে সাময়িক উপশম অবশ্যই হয়। ↗

— Abu Taher Misbah

#human-nature #nature

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it? ↗

— Stephen Crane

#humor #naturalism #nature