#lit

O it's Tommy this, and Tommy that, and Tommy 'ow's your soul/But it's thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll. ↗

— Rudyard Kipling

#military

Maxim 2: A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries ↗

— Howard Tayler

#military #rules-to-live-by #military

Sure, it sucked to be lost, but I'd long ago realized I preferred it to depending on anyone else to get me where I needed to go. That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened- good, bad, or anywhere in between- it was always, if nothing else, all your own. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#self-reliance #solitude #independence

(Mal) We have done the impossible. And that makes us mighty. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#human-spirit #impossibility #team-work #spirit

There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means. ↗

— Calvin Coolidge

#dignity

There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied. ↗

— John Fraser

#criticism #morality #philosophy #theory #art

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints. ↗

— David Sedaris

#individuality #fact

It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#fact

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#responsibility #stop-terrorism #terror #terrorism #terrorism

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life. And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#teens #writing #young-adult-literature #life