Mona Bahgat > Mona's Quotes

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance

“Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization