#dec

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#dictatorship #emotional-plague #hitler #laval #liberty

Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia. ↗

— Boris Yeltsin

#approved #declaration #declared #independence #know

And that's what I liked about it, because they are, in the beginning, your little beautiful stock figures, who then make a decision to preserve their futures, but the decision they make isn't completely right, and it destroys their futures. ↗

— Kevin Williamson

#beautiful #because #beginning #completely #decision

We must be bound to one another then," Elric murmured despairingly. "Bound by hell-forged chains and fate-haunted circumstance. Well, then—let it be thus so—and men will have cause to tremble and flee when they hear the names of Elric of Melinbone and Stormbringer, his sword. We are two of a kind—produced by an age which has deserted us. Let us give this age cause to hate us! ↗

— Michael Moorcock

#elric-of-melnibone #eternal-champion #pulp #age

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit. ↗

— Robert Charles Wilson

#childhood #deceit #lying #art

Richard Branson once said: 'Tony's very good at selling bands and he's very good at making television programmes. But he'll never be great at either, until he decides which one he wants to do.' I entirely accept that. That doesn't matter to me very much. I like the irony of the two lives. ↗

— Tony Wilson

#bands #decides #either #entirely #good

[R]aging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#cliches #crime #exclusion #immigration #morals

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#deceive #get #i #i think #older

In 1958, we decided to go to Australia. We were there for six months, and all the shows went well. ↗

— Ernie Wise

#decided #go #months #shows #six

That said, my kids are at home right now with my husband and I'm missing something important at my daughter's school which makes me feel sick inside. It's a lot of balance and a lot of really hard decision making. ↗

— Reese Witherspoon

#daughter #decision #decision making #feel #hard