Romi > Romi's Quotes

“The art of rap is deceptive. It seems so straightforward and personal and real that people read it completely literally, as raw testimony or autobiography. And sometimes the words we use, nigga, bitch, motherfucker, and the violence of the images overwhelms some listeners. It's all white noise to them till they hear a bitch or a nigga and then they run off yelling "See!" and feel vindicated in their narrow conception of what the music is about.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“School administrators can’t say it’s up to the parents. Parents can’t say it’s up to the teachers. Teachers can’t say it’s not their job. And kids can’t say, “I was too afraid to tell.” Every single one of us has to play our role if we’re serious about putting an end to the madness. We are all responsible. We must be.”
― Megan Kelley Hall, Dear Bully

“Bystanders who do nothing give bullies permission inadvertently to go on being bullies. Most are afraid they’ll lose friends or be bullied themselves if they help victims or report bullies, and some feel guilty for years afterward.”
― Megan Kelley Hall, Dear Bully

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
― Augustine of Hippo, City of God

“Kollotai’s book, written in the disillusionment of exile, was a frank description of how liberation felt from the inside; it also granted a candid look into the psyches of those who had liberated themselves from morals only to find themselves, as a result, the slaves of passion.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“Kollontai stumbles upon the essence of sexual liberation as a form of control; it is “voluntary incarceration.” Because the will is more important than reason to the revolutionary, because in effect will is the essence of reason for both the Marxist and the Nietzschean, the revolutionary is unable to see how he is enslaved by his own will because he is unable to see the role that passion plays in that self-subversion. All the revolutionary can see is his passion, and because his only thought is how to gratify those passions - morals having discredited as “bourgeois” - he is blind to how his passions control him.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“We are talking here about a vicious circle. Life as a rootless, unmarried cosmopolite led inevitably to loneliness, which led to an affair, which led to an even greater sense of alienation after it was consummated, which led to a desire to be free from the chains of love, which led to more work, which led to more loneliness. Kollontai’s new woman is a slave to her own passions, a slavery which is all more effective because she can never identify its source.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“[...] it should be obvious that for the new woman, love and identity are mutually exclusive. A woman can have love or she can have an “ego,” but she can’t have both. [...] Love means the extinction of personality. A woman can only be herself if she renounces love. [...] The new woman is a self that is forever lonely, drawn to a love that is forever devouring and humiliating.”
― E. Michael Jones

“In order to re-engineer man, the “invisible governors” had to create a world populated by “mass man,” rootless individuals cut off from ethnic and religious affiliation who relied not on religion or tradition or the moral codes they propagated, but rather on the opinion of what seemed to be everyone else as propagated by the mass media. The new authority which everyone followed in this regard was science. Science broke taboos; science gave rational permission whereas tradition proposed only irrational restraint.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“Liberalism freed men from superstitions like belief in God. Yet, once there was no God, once the moral law had been discredited as equally superstitious, then social control becomes a necessity because the object of self-control, the passions, now had nothing to give them direction or keep them under control. Just as social chaos was the natural result of liberalism’s philosophy, so social control was the natural result of its politics; the one flowed inexorably from the order. The paradox of liberalism lay in the fact that it promoted passion as liberation from traditional morals and belief in God, but only as an intermediary stage followed by the imposition of another more draconian order which it established the benefit not of priests but of scientists and their wealth backers in industry and the regime.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“So the largely homosexual Nazi leadership now could eliminate its opponents by charging them with the crime of homosexuality, which also served as a way of defaming their character as well. If any actual homosexuals ended up in concentration camps, it was simply because they happened to be at the wrong end of the political equation, and not because of their homosexuality, a tactic which the contemporary homosexual movement evidently learned as well, recently “outing” a congressman who voted against recognizing homosexual marriages.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view.”
― C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“[...] advertisers soon came to realize that consumers were not “infinitely malleable.” [...] As they became more and more convinced that the consumer was motivated by nonrational and even irrational buying appeals, they were forced to consider the nature of desire and where those desires came from. [...] they began to realize that consumption patterns varied widely from the objective circumstances dictated by a real world and were more influenced by unacknowledged desires. These desires, however, were radically limited in number and had only a tenuous connection to a product, but that connection could be strengthened by conditioning. It was at this point that the advertisers began to see sex as a marketing strategy. Man was not “infinitely malleable”; he was a rational creature with a tenuous hold on his passions, which were limited in number, sex being one of the most easily manipulated. Success in advertising meant, therefore, using the conditioned reflex to attach a particular product to the consumer’s sexual passion.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“Bessel van der Kolk told me. He then cited Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living. As long as one doesn’t examine oneself, one is completely subject to whatever one is wired to do, but once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“[E]mpathy without accountability is a shortsighted attempt to relieve suffering.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter Fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning