#tho

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ↗

— Logan Pearsall Smith

#authority

I want my name to mean me. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#authority

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together." Brene Brown ↗

— Brené Brown

#authority

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author. ↗

— Elbert Hubbard

#authority

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#literary-criticism #obscurity #writing #authority

Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade. ↗

— Alan Moore

#authority #authority

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#duty #independent-thought #independence

They'll be granted immunity!" I feel myself rising from my chair, my voice full of resonant. "You will personally pledge this in front of the entire population of District Thirteen and the remainder of Twelve. Soon. Today. It will be recorded for future generations. You will hold yourself and your government responsible for their safety, or you'll find yourself another Mockingjay! ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#katniss-everdeen #peeta-mellark #the-hunger-games #ultimatum #responsibility

They're Lares. House gods." "House gods," Percy said. "Like...smaller than real gods, but larger than apartment gods? ↗

— Rick Riordan

#house-gods #lares #mythology #real-gods #rome

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ↗

— M. John Harrison

#greed #human-nature #thought #dreams