#sm

I think I know what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers. ↗

— William T. Sherman

#glory #journalism #military

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. ↗

— David Craig

#atheists #biologists #friedrich-engels #god #humanists

The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God. ↗

— Annie Wood Besant

#atheism #god #atheist

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#belief #disbelief #metaphysics #reality #theism

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#metaphysics #metaphysics

Knock him out, Paris!” “Sure. Want me to spew diamonds from my ass while I’m at it? ↗

— Gena Showalter

#paris

I will be known forever as the Puppy who chased a cutpurse and caught fish garbage instead. My descendants will pretend I'm not in their bloodline. No – no one will want to make descendants with me. [from Beka Cooper's journal of her first day as a new Dog i.e. cop] ↗

— Tamora Pierce

#first-day #police-officer #journalism

The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse. ↗

— Catherine Keller

#colonialism #feminism #history #nature #oppression

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#communism #hinduism #socialism #spirituality #anarchy

The leather community is largely anarchistic and shares a healthy distrust of power and arrogance. ↗

— Geoff Mains

#bdsm #leather #anarchy