#id

Compassion is a lifetime business. You can't say something like, "I will have compassion on Monday, Thursdays and Fridays only. But for the rest, I will be cruel". That is hypocrisy. ↗

— Israelmore Ayivor

#compassion #cruel #cruelity #days-of-the-week #food-for-thought

[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. … [E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#capitalist-realism #ideology #nature #neoliberalism #possibility

There was something I needed to say. “Sorry. About before.” Fang shot a sideways glance at me, his eyes dark and inscrutable, as always. He looked back out at the water. I didn’t expect any more acknowledgment than that. Fang never- “You almost gave me a heart attack,” he said quietly. “When I saw you, and all that blood . . .” He threw a small rock as hard as he could down the beach. “I’m sorry.” “Don’t do it again,” he said. I swallowed hard. “I won’t.” Something changed right then, but I didn’t know what. ↗

— James Patterson

#maxride #change

At that moment I had no mind to change, or not change, or throw against the nearest wall. ↗

— James Patterson

#mamimum #maximum-ride #mind #ride #change

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign. ↗

— Theodore White

#anywhere #campaign #excitement #match #presidential

The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#apprehension #deep #earliest #fears #glimpse

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#ideas #reading #words #change

AIDS is a judgment we have brought upon ourselves. ↗

— Mary Whitehouse

#brought #judgment #ourselves #upon

All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride. ↗

— Sophocles

#character #course #crime #failure #mistakes

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings. ↗

— Rumi

#change #growth #presence #the-middle-way #beauty