#here

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals. ↗

— Herman Melville

#devils #dignity #equals #hell #hell is

Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#jesus #judas-iscariot #preterite #equality

There will always be a place for us somewhere, somehow, as long as we see to it that working people fight for everything they have, everything they hope to get, for dignity, equality, democracy, to oppose war and to bring to the world a better life. ↗

— Harry Bridges

#better #better life #bring #democracy #dignity

We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children. ↗

— Peter Shaffer

#bombings #children #danger #england #evacuation

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge. ↗

— Cleveland Amory

#expensive #foreign #hard #husband #like

His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. “People don’t just buy books because they need books,” he has said. “There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging. ↗

— Richard L. Brandt

#book-lovers #experience #experience

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent. ↗

— Natan Sharansky

#because #believe #dissent #everyone #fear

Golf... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well. ↗

— P. G. Wodehouse

#ball #faithfully #go #god #golf

Everywhere you look, there is a charity or a project in school to get involved in. In eighth grade, there was this program called CJSF, California Junior Scholarship Foundation. We were involved in soup kitchens and toy drives, and your school can set up something like that. If your school doesn't have a program like that, set one up. ↗

— Lindsey Shaw

#called #charity #drives #eighth #eighth grade

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”) ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#heresy #heretics #tolstoy #faith