#pol

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#politics #music

She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR. ↗

— Padgett Powell

#political-causes #the-pennant-race #truth #men

She now represents the Western United States, thus proving politics is even more accepting of the strange, unusual, and mostly useless than the music industry. ↗

— John Zakour

#humour #politics #music

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing. ↗

— David Lovelace

#depression #manic-depression #suicide #death

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#political-philosophy #nature

The reason I don't Kill Myself is because I know I can. ↗

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

#mental-disorders #mental-health #suicide #suicide-attempt #mental-health

Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County. ↗

— John Grisham

#thriller #thriller

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood] ↗

— Victor Hugo

#les-misérables #political #poverty #society #victor-hugo

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history. ↗

— Martin Cruz Smith

#humanity #nature #nuclear #nuclear-war #pollution

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#philosophy #politics #men