#ch

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. ↗

— Cornel West

#change #courage #future #hope #inequalities

This principle - that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend - is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractivess will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman "lets herself go" or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#love #marriage #romance #change

All I can say is, she's the one I think about. All the time. She's the voice I want to hear. She's the face I hope to see. - Sam Roxton ↗

— Sophie Kinsella

#i-ve-got-your-number #sophie-kinsella #sam

So..." Heather nodded slowly. "We're still here." "Yep. I think your team of SWAT guys got lost. Probably looking for their shirts." She made a face at him. "You're effing hilarious." "I try. ↗

— Chelsea Fine

#chelsea-fine #gabriel #heather #hilarious

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. ↗

— Mark Cantrell

#science-fiction #social-justice #totalitarian-system-mechanisms #unemployment #welfare

If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in school is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism. ↗

— John Whitehead

#totalitarianism #totalitarianism

You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High. But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#moral-superiority #morality #totalitarianism

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#death

There's a time I can recall Four years old and three feet tall Trying to touch the stars and the cookie jar And both were out of reach ↗

— Hilary Weeks

#reaching #hilarious

Welcome to Morganville.You'll never want to leave.And even if you do...well, you can't. Sorry about that. ↗

— Rachel Caine

#eve-rosser #michael-glass #morganville-vampires #myrnin #oliver