#tis

There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots. ↗

— Iain Banks

#soldiers #war #heroism

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes ↗

— Bertolt Brecht

#heroism #patriotism #role-models #heroism

The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression. ↗

— John Derbyshire

#hedonish #selfishness #vanity #pessimism

Holly is alive,' thought Foaly 'My princess lives,'exulted Orion. 'And we're chasing a dragon ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#atlantis-complex #foaly-the-centaur #orion #dragons

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#protestantism #shi-ism #sunnism #catholicism

Above all else show the data. ↗

— Edward R. Tufte

#graphics #statistics #visualization

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening. And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV. ↗

— Peter Hitchens

#americans #anti-british-sentiment #braveheart #britons #eavesdropping

Keeping me a virgin waiting for him for so long proved he owned me even more than fucking me would have. ↗

— Tiffany Reisz

#fetish #bdsm

This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated. ↗

— Grant H. Kester

#collaborative #contemporary #modernism #practice #subjectivity

I am living breathing freedom ↗

— Hiroko Sakai

#free #free-spirit #freedom #independence #life