#asses

The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that. ↗

— Carlos Castaneda

#break #deal #down #extremely #historical

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view. ↗

— Peter Conrad

#angle #city #contains #ever #indirect

Fashion Fact: Most people make the assumption that I wear trendy shades the majority of the time (often indoors) to protect my eyes from the elements. But in fact it's the reverse. I'm protecting the elements from the brilliance of my eyes. ↗

— Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino

#eyes #fashion #sunglasses #beauty

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#called #die #eyes #fact #in fact

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. ↗

— Ingmar Bergman

#conscience #dark #deep #deep down #directly

The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader. ↗

— Nikki Giovanni

#authority #classes #i #overcomes #reader

A brick could be used to perpetually feed the hungry, stop all wars, educate the masses, and ensure everlasting peace for all populations throughout time. Wait, I’m sorry, that’s not right. I was confusing a brick with a blanket. It’s a blanket that could be used for all those things. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#confusion #education #feed #food #hunger

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#democracy #follower #leader #living #masses

Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down. ↗

— Trevanian

#inarticulate #masses #shibumi #wad #age

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs. ↗

— Gustave Le Bon

#crowds #decline #indifference #the-masses #respect