#sm

Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged. ↗

— Czesław Miłosz

#karl-marx #opium-of-the-people #religion #death

If you expect the worst, you'll never be disappointed. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#disappointment

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true. ↗

— James Richardson

#proverbs #truth #wisdom #equality

Somehow I took whatever criticism there was very much to heart. ↗

— Dusty Springfield

#heart #i #much #somehow #took

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#complained #deserve #entertaining #heroism #i

My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting 'look at this.' It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all. ↗

— John Bolton

#best #better #closer #government #look

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens. ↗

— Mark Boal

#down #exactly #feature #feature film #film

Equality not only in quantity is the best way of quality. ↗

— Paola Calvillo

#karl-marx #socialism #equality

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#continuity #descartes #existence #existentialism #experience

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#anarchist #politics #experience