#nit

…My present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States: it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gilded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own, their votes. And who benefits most? The lawyers. (Chapter 4) ↗

— Shirley Chisholm

#attitude

If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read. ↗

— Tony Reinke

#reading #beauty

I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision. ↗

— Vanessa Veselka

#humanity #terror #beauty

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#pain #beauty

The founder of a religion must be able to turn water into wine -- cure with a word the blind and lame, and raise with a simple touch the dead to life. It was necessary for him to demonstrate to the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple, that he was superior to nature. In times of ignorance this was easy to do. The credulity of the savage was almost boundless. To him the marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was the sublime. Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle -- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood. No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of a miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of, nature. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#founding #miracle #nature #religion #sanity

…I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#lost-opportunity #princess #sleeping-beauty #too-hard #beauty

We think there's a huge opportunity in smaller vehicles. Smaller vehicles done in an American way. ↗

— Freeman Thomas

#american way #done #huge #huge opportunity #opportunity

[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea. ↗

— Carl Sagan as Ellie Arroway

#space-and-cosmos #wonder #beauty

He goes on and on about war like it is something beautiful and noble, which only means he's never seen it himself. War is hideous and it leaves you covered in shit. I cannot kill anyone else. I will not. ↗

— Anita Diamant

#conscientious-objection #day-after-night #kill #killing #war

[The sound of the wind] was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand. ↗

— Anita Diamant

#beauty #day-after-night #meaninglessness-of-life #random-chance #randomness