#y

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#reputation #fame

To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame ↗

— Alfred de Vigny

#idiocy #power #fame

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#misandry #misogyny #sexism #gender

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics. ↗

— Randall Munroe

#nerd #society #gender

Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#jesus #gospel

Hamilton awkwardly folded himself into the passenger seat. "Couldn't you get something bigger?" he asked as he banged his knee against the dashboard. "We're supposed to be a diversion," Jonah said. "Got to make an entrance. Can't do that in a minivan, Giganto Boy. Can't do much in a minivan except look about as uncool as it gets." "Hey! My dad drives a minivan." "Snap. ↗

— Jude Watson

#diversity

Even if he got shanked, even if his precious little ego and his dumb-ass little heart got shattered into a million pieces, it was time to stop the bullshit. It was time to be a male. As Blay started to straighten, like a message had been received, Qhuinn thought, That's right Buddy. Our time has come. ↗

— J.R. Ward

#qhuinn #ego

We can't all be stars because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as I go by. ↗

— Sebastian Horsley

#ego #ego

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner? ↗

— Frank Zappa

#floss #lyrics #teeth #zappa #censorship

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#foucault #history #philosophy #sex #the-history-of-sexuality