#pro

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.  ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#war #propaganda

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#characterization #propaganda

Inside, I’m assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment’s hardwired loudspeaker. There’s one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang ↗

— Adam Johnson

#propaganda

You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#broken-promise #trust #betrayal

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#compromise #conflict-resolution #evil #indecisiveness #judgement

In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out ↗

— Yann Martel Life of Pi

#thought-provoking

The guy that's going to kick your ass for hurting her. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#protective #adrian-ivashkov

Habitual procrastinators will readily testify to all the lost opportunities, missed deadlines, failed relationships and even monetary losses incurred just because of one nasty habit of putting things off until it is often too late. ↗

— Stephen Richards

#defer #delay #dilly-dallying #laziness #postpone

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets. ↗

— Lev Grossman

#profundity #cosmic-ordering

Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors' lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated or accused of being gullible or of giving the survivor false memories. Many workers work in isolation and a climate of hostility and are unable to talk about the work they do. Yes, despite all the odds, survivors of ritual abuse are beginning to speak out about their experiences, and some people, mainly in voluntary organisations, are beginning to listen to them and support them. [Published 2001] ↗

— Laurie Matthew

#child-abuse #childabuse #childhood-abuse #false-memories #healing