#men

Our minds are information vacuums. Either we fill them with thoughts of our choosing or someone else will. ↗

— Ray Davis

#empowerment #free-will #minds #empowerment

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. ↗

— Jane Austen

#women-writers #vanity

Whether you say you can't or you can, you're right. ↗

— Walt Disney Company

#empowerment

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#antiwar-movement #bosnian-war #leftism #noam-chomsky #dictatorship

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#dictatorship #government #dictatorship

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#hypocrisy #inconsistancy #principles #temperament #hypocrisy

It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind. ↗

— نجيب محفوظ

#heart #sentimentality #skepticism #skepticism

There is more food in a pennyworth of bread than in a gallon of ale. ↗

— Joseph Livesey

#alcohol #ale #bread #food #nourishment

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#humility #love

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#idolatry #idols #love-disappointment #love