#polar

But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power... They were true believers who meant what they said, whether it was 'No New Taxes' or 'We are a Christian Nation.' In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left's leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or you were against us. You had to choose sides. ↗

— Barack Obama

#polarizing #politics #leadership

But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud. ↗

— Marya Hornbacher

#crashing #falling #love #mental-illness #new-love

Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love. ↗

— Marya Hornbacher

#falling #love #madness #mental-illness #sudden

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#music

They won’t put me in an insane asylum because I dance very well and give money to anyone who asks. ↗

— Vaslav Nijinsky

#mental-illness #schrizophrenia #money

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible... ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#depression #elizabeth-wurtzel #mental-illness #prozac-nation #movies

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

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

Some people do polarizing the religion against science. I use both to solve a problem with two different kind of approach. ↗

— Toba Beta

#different #polarize #problem-solving #religion #science

When I think of the causes for which people more commonly give up their lives-nationalism, religion, ethnicity-it seems to me that a thirty-five pound bag of rocks and the lost world it represents, is not such a bad thing to die for. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#polar-exploration #religion