#ding

Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#enlightment #humanity #understanding #enlightenment

Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace. ↗

— Voltaire

#enlightenment

Frodo: I can't do this, Sam. Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam? Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#holding-on #lord-of-the-rings #sam-gamgee #stories #chance

If you understood everything I said, you’d be me ↗

— Miles Davis

#understanding #identity

I am a rare species, not a stereotype. ↗

— Ivan E. Coyote

#gay #gender-bending #gender-spectrum #labels #lesbian

Only the nonreader fears books. ↗

— Richard Peck

#censorship #reading #censorship

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. ↗

— Claude Adrien Helvétius

#censorship #reading #censorship

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us. ↗

— Katherine Paterson

#censorship #reading #censorship

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#censoring #reading #censorship

Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'? ↗

— Joseph Henry Jackson

#censorship #reading #censorship