#avery

I’ve learned a lot about love over these last months. And part of what I’ve learned is that you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head. ↗

— Zoë Marriott

#hopelessness #love #lovers #romance #dreams

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world. ↗

— Nicholas D. Kristof

#morality #slavery #women #equality

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#experience

But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least. ↗

— Jenny Diski

#bravery #discretion #experiences #tourism #travel

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#life

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . . The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#democracy #slavery #men

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#god #human #inspirational #mere-christianity #religious

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know. ↗

— William Wilberforce

#accomplish #christian #great-britain #heard #hope

You have to be the bravest person in the world to go out every day, being yourself when no one likes who you are. ↗

— Matthew Dicks

#bravery #inspirational #inspirational

The future doesn't belong to the light-hearted. It belongs to the brave. ↗

— Ronald Reagan

#inspirational #reagan #inspirational