#nit

And it’s all my fault, Gale. Because of what I did in the arena. If I had just killed myself with those berries, none of this would’ve happened. Peeta could have come home and lived, and everyone else would have been safe, too.” “Safe to do what?” he says in a gentler tone. “Starve? Work like slaves? Send their kids to the reaping? You haven’t hurt people – you’ve given them an opportunity. They just have to be brave enough to take it. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#opportunity #rebellion #rebellion

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is easy. True christianity…that's rebellion. ↗

— Alice Cooper

#rock-n-roll #rebellion

I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man. ↗

— Primo Levi

#mankind #mankind

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#humanity #mankind #mercy #mankind

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it." [Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2] ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#darkness #fiction #human #humanity #mankind

People with lost personalities will suffer a great deal more than those with lost virginities. ↗

— Melina Marchetta

#virginity #advice

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#metaphysical-beliefs #mindfulness #piety #theism #transcendence

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#metaphysics

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. ↗

— Alan Watts

#duty #full #god #idea #infinity

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading. ↗

— Leszek Kołakowski

#doubt #irony #modernity #philosophy #self-criticism