#erm

To have my life accepted as just another ordinary life, to have it viewed as common and regular, was a singular moment. ↗

— Katherine A. Briccetti

#families #lesbian-partners #sperm-donors #family

Later, I started to understand just why these children ‘hated’ us other children. I understood that they did not, in fact, hate ‘us’, but hated the fact that we were German and spoke in a language that they associated with pain, fear and the loss of their parents, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, their whole families, in fact. Once I understood this it affected me in all sorts of subconscious ways, ways that were to blight my life for many years and make me deny my German birth. ↗

— Alfred Nestor

#alfred-nestor #author-alfred-nestor #hitler #hitler-s-germany #nazi-party

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#empowerment #feminism #freedom #gender #hypocrisy

Life calls the tune, we dance. ↗

— John Galsworthy

#determinism #fate #free #freedom #will

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life. ↗

— Sam Harris

#determinism #free-will #inspiration #philosophy #self-improvement

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. ↗

— Martin Luther King Jr.

#germany #hitler #hungary #jews #peace

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. ↗

— Daniel C. Dennett

#free-will #indeterminism #freedom

The quest of discovering your empowered self is a process of refinement, not accumulation. Cut away the nonsense, the drama, the regret, the scars of the past, and make a decision to no longer let them govern your happiness and freedom. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#empowerment #freedom #happiness #life #past

If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#dominoes #freedom #philosophy #want #freedom

Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you? Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#freedom #humanity #liberty #mankind #self-determination