#pit

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#friends #pity #school #schoolmates #memoir

Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie. ↗

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#commodity-production #communism #economics #communism

For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#groupthink #milgram #mob #pith #elections

But with her eyes closed, she began to whisper. “If you have someone to love, then love. If you have someone to forgive, then forgive. You think, when you’re seventeen, there’s time enough for that, but there’s not. There’s no time at all.” I squeezed her hand, trying to think of how to respond. But she took the burden from me and kept whispering. “You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that’s the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#art #artist #dating #death #dying-words

Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics. ↗

— Sebastian Horsley

#narcotics #self-esteem #self-pity #self-esteem

Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon! ↗

— Matthew Gregory Lewis

#arrogance #callousness #catholicism #cold-hearted-people #cruelty

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#serendipity #writing #writing-process #bizarre

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#believing #cynic #gone #knowing #nothing

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive. ↗

— Pat Barker

#mental-illness #ptsd #trauma #war #mental-illness

Too many people are endowed with a feeling of entitlement, but born without God-given empathy. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#pitfalls-of-the-human-race #truth-quotes #wisdom-quotes #empathy