Quotes by Writers - Page 127

We're attacking all accepted values. Authority, class differences, shared perceptions. We don't care what happens to our social structure -- revolutions are for suckers. Our target is people's collective consciousness. It's like throwing a cream pie in their face.
Fuminori Nakamura
They ought not to have let things come to this," he said, but he was never very clear even to himself who or why "They" were nor what "This" was. Some person or persons unknown was to blame. He hated these unknowns in general. But he was unable to focus his hatred into hating some responsible person or persons in particular. If only he could find who it was had neglected to do something, or had done something wrong or messed about with things, they would catch it. He'd get even with them somehow.
H.G.Wells
Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.
Joseph Campbell
Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render him what is God's — that is a sacrifice we dare not make!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
To be right is just one more reason not to achieve any success.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is a class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.
Owen Jones
People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence cases to have any point of meaning
Aldous Huxley
Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.
Aldous Huxley
[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.
Clay Shirky
Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Samuel Johnson
our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness
Samuel Johnson
it's hard to talk sensibly with giants - their massive heads tend to get lost in the clouds
Rick Poynor
But alas, my dear child, we are the slaves of custom, the dupes of prejudice, and dare not stem the torrent of the opposing world, even though our judgments condemn our compliance! However, since the die is cast, we must endeavor to make the best of it.
Fanny Burney
Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!
Mark Cantrell
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.
Clay Shirky
[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
Clay Shirky
[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.
Clay Shirky
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
Clay Shirky
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
Clay Shirky
There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.
Samuel Johnson
In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.
Joseph Campbell
He is among those beings of great scope who spread their leafy branches willingly over broad horizons. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Those who most obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The ones who hate me the most are the ones who don't scare me.
Rebecca McKinsey
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.
H.P. Lovecraft
When we change the way we communicate, we change society
Clay Shirky
Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
Nicolas Chamfort
We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.
Alan W. Watts
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.A fissure forms in the vessel. I’m cracking open.
Libba Bray
No social stability without individual stability.
Aldous Huxley
But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]
Hilary Mantel
It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]
Hilary Mantel
What about you and me, Adina?” Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. “I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?”Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock ‘n’ roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable bass-playing girls from New Hampshire. But he didn’t exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she’d invented as much as he’d invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn’t be the same mistakes. Starting now.“Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. ”Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.
Libba Bray
The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con."...As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.
Robert Sheaffer
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
Emma Goldman
Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.
Elbert Hubbard
This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, which is the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.
Lierre Keith
No, I have no desire to be a feminist, I just want to be a female,
Gyula Krúdy
[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.
H.G.Wells
When women turn on women, and take cheap shots at their decisions purely to score political points it serves as proof that feminism, as a movement, is dead and no longer relevant or credible.
S.E. Cupp
You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.
Nnedi Okorafor
Let’s be very clear about this, asshole: I’ve been a woman in Arkansas. I know damn well what it means when a man says to me 'Calm down.' Being raped comes next, and that’s a fact I’m never going to forget.
Agnostic Zetetic
You are not your virginity. You are a human being. The state of your hymen has nothing to do with your worth.
A.S. King
[S]ocial order displays not the absolute presence or absence of intolerance to difference but a spectrum of intolerance. Each of us bears responsibility to some degree for maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which could not be kept in place if every single one of us did not play our part. From bringing up children ‘appropriately’, to lovingly correcting or punishing their inappropriate behaviour, to making sure we never breach the protocols ourselves, to staring or sniggering at people who look different, to coercive psychiatric and medical intervention, to emotional blackmail, to physical violence-it’s a range of slippages all the way that we seldom recognize.
Nivedita Menon
I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I'm a scourge upon women everywhere, just because I refuse to spread your particular agenda? That's dark, and it's not what you fought for. If you continue this way, you're worse than they are (they = men). We are all just trying to get by. There is room for all of us.
Lena Dunham
The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better.But that isn't how it works.
Lena Dunham
Women are complicated and messy and we are certainly not perfect, but we are funny and challenging and kind, and I wouldn't change a thing
Melissa McCarthy
Although drinking to the point of becoming incapacitated is unwise and risky for anyone, the blame for rape must be put on the rapist who preys on a drunk woman, not a drunk woman who becomes prey. If my car is stolen after I’ve parked it with the door unlocked in a neighborhood known for car theft, a crime has been committed, and I have the right and expectation to report the crime to the police. No one would tell me that the thief is the one who deserves sympathy, and that apprehending him would ruin his life. No one would tell me I’m a terrible person for getting my car stolen, and that I deserve to have my car stolen. They would be right to question my judgment, but not the fact that a crime has been committed. But when it comes to rape, the victim’s pre-rape actions are used to justify the crime.
Leora Tanenbaum
Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women who need abortions through slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible.
Leora Tanenbaum
It was so hard to feel safe in the world when you were a girl.
Libba Bray
Because the pure girls get rescued." Mary Lou felt something she didn't let herself feel often. She was well and truly pissed off. "Why do girls have to be all pure and innocent and good? Why don't guys have to be?
Libba Bray
It had the word bitches in it, which is perfectly fine to use if you're a rapper or a director making a movie about career women, but not if you're a teen girl talking about her homies.""Good point, Petra. We know that young ladies of the teen persuasion do not use these indelicate words. Nor do they have thoughts about sex, masturbation, violence, being competitive, or farting.
Libba Bray
They focused a large amount of their wrath on people trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming, condemning them as “Social Justice Warriors.” (That label was always so weird to me, because how is that an insult? “Social Justice Warrior” actually sounds pretty badass.)
Felicia Day
If you call yourself an "authoress" on your Facebook profile, you suck at life. You are stupid and your children are ugly. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to be cute and original. You're not. You are about as original as all those other witless twits "writing" the one millionth shitty Fifty Shades clone. Or maybe you're trying to show your 2000 fake Facebook "friends" that you are an empowered feminist who will not stand for sexist terminology. But you're not showing people that you are fighting the good fight, you're showing people that you are a sheep, who's trying just a little too hard to ride the current wave of idiotic political correctness. The word "author" is no more gender-discrimination than the word "person." Do you call yourself a personess? No, of course not, because then you might as well wear a sign around your neck that says, "Hello, I'm a retard.
Oliver Markus
We could talk about the retraction of re-productive rights in North Carolina and Texas and Ohio, or we could conjure up a lot of statistics about domestic and sexual violence or women living in poverty. If the patriarchy is dead, the numbers have not gotten the memo.
Roxanne Gay
However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
She will not bow her head to any woman or man, so why, indeed, should she bow to a needle?
Libbie Hawker