#m

Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. (The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#philosophical #philosophy #change

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#love #michael-ondaatje #novels #romance #the-english-patient

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#change

I know there was a time, when our country was new, when the assignment of these numbers helped organize something that was on the brink of not existing. But we are no longer that country. We are so much more now. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#change #kiera-cass #the-elite #the-selection #change

..nothing in your past can change how I feel about you. And God knows I’m no saint. ↗

— Sylvia Day

#eva-tramell #gideon-cross #reflected-in-you #change

You can’t go home again” ─ isn’t necessarily that places change but people do. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#home #change

Only the family, society's smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be "strangers in a strange land," who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt. ↗

— Salvador Minuchin

#family-relationships #kids #love #change

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace. ↗

— Kristina McMorris

#peace #philosophy #war #wisdom #world-war-ii

The great commandment is that we preach the gospel to every creature, but neither God nor the Bible says anything about forcing it down people's throats. ↗

— Louis Zamperini

#billy-graham #god #gospel #jesus-christ #preach

The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them. ↗

— Guy Sajer

#humanity #soldier #war #world-war-ii #world-war-ii