#pet

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#dictatorship #emotional-plague #hitler #laval #liberty

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#compelled #feels #i #imagine #like

In the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#daily #daily bread #empty #empty stomach #first

In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will to false power. ↗

— Marianne Williamson

#beings #false #glorious #illusion #imprisoned

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. ↗

— Zhuangzi

#generous #great #petty #wisdom

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#among #beat #between #competing #contests

Before he'd met Anna, he'd thought he'd known what love was, thought he'd understood about friendship, romance, all of it, but he hadn't - not at all. Until he'd held Anna in his arms, until he'd let her see into his soul, until he'd heard her cry gently when he made love to her for the first time, he'd known nothing. And now, sometimes, when it was just the two of them, when he smelt her hair, caught her eye, he felt as though he knew all there was to know about everything, as though they knew the secret of life. A secret far more powerful than Longevity, far more long-lasting. ↗

— Gemma Malley

#peter-pincent #surplus-anna #the-resistance #friendship

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#after #come #conscience #dog #examine

The more you face the truth, the angrier you will probably become. You have a right to be angry about being sexually abused. You have a right to be angry with the perpetrator, regardless of who it was, how long ago the sexual abuse occurred, or how much he/she has changed. ↗

— Beverly Engel

#anger #innocence #perpetrator #rape #sexual-abuse

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#alone #books #cats #cook #feed