Mark > Mark's Quotes

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.”
― Humphry Davy

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”
― Alexander Pope

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“the bulk of day-to-day responsibilities for the reproduction of labor at home fall on wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters. This unpaid labor does not directly create surplus value, yet it is critical to workers’ abilities to produce surplus, and therefore necessary to maintaining the profitability of the system. And so it is no coincidence that sexist ideologies that relegate women to second-class citizens emphasize women’s nurturing capacity, which make us “naturally suited” to prioritizing husbands and children over our own lives.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions—of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more—that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism. In fact, any place where bosses can hold down the wages of one section of the workforce not only ensures a cheaper labor pool among the oppressed demographic, but also, in the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, divides both in order to conquer each, so that everyone’s wages are pushed down.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Capitalism is not designed to meet human need; it is designed to generate profit. This means not only robbing workers of our humanity and life, but also the soil, the air, the planet.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics