bobbygw > bobbygw's Quotes

“In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit ... are the highest form of consciousness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
― Noam Chomsky

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
― Noam Chomsky

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
― Bell Hooks

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. --bell hooks”
― bh

“feminism is for everybody”
― bell hooks

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
― Primo Levi

“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
― Emily Dickinson

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean & Impressive

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God