#ruth

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. ↗

— George Orwell

#torture

A need for revenge can burn long and hot. Especially if every glance in a mirror reinforces it. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#reinforce #revenge #truth #revenge

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management? ↗

— Tom Robbins

#fact #life #meaning-of-life #reality #religion

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately. ↗

— Scott Adams

#terrorism #truth #wisdom #atheist

I'm not mean, I'm honest. Nobody is ever straightforward. But sometimes people need to hear the truth. ↗

— Jessica Warman

#truth #honesty

You can't let the truth bring out the worst and let it get the best of you. ↗

— Criss Jami

#best #clever #condescension #humble #humility

Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong. ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#right #truth #wrong #gossip

It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world. ↗

— James Connolly

#civilized #death #destruction #elite #humanity

Of all the weapons she had commanded, Elizabeth knew the least of love; and of all the weapons in the world, love was the most dangerous. ↗

— Seth Grahame-Smith

#prejudice

Nothing can be more notorious than the calumnies and invectives with which the wisest measures and most virtuous characters of The United States have been pursued and traduced [By American Newspapers] ↗

— Thurgood Marshall

#humour #satire #satire