Sidney > Sidney's Quotes

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course— its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve. The broad fidelity to this law helps make sense of what we observe all around: the powerful fighting to “change the world” in ways that essentially keep it the same, and “giving back” in ways that sustain an indefensible distribution of influence, resources, and tools.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.” While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all. Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“If obesity were an infectious disease, the team’s data suggested “the outbreak” would have begun in Greene County, Alabama.”
― David DeRose, Thirty Days to Natural Blood Pressure Control: The “No Pressure” Solution

“least forty-three organized boy gangs treaded Richmond’s landscape, twelve of them from Southside (across the river at Manchester): Gamble’s Hill Cats, Grace Street Cats, Oregon Hill Cats (also Terribles), Sidney Cats, Harveytown Cats, First, Second, and Third Street Cats, Tenth Street Gang, Fourth Street Horribles, Fifth Street Gang, Shockoe Hill Gang, Butchertown Gang, Rocketts Gang, Church Hill Gang, Union Hill Gang, Old Market Gang, Gully Nation Gang, Sheep Hill Gang, Brook Road Gang, Hobo Gang, Lulu Gang, Clyde Row Gang, Park Sparrows Gang, Bumtown Gang, Basin Bank Cats, Twenty-Seventh Street Gang, Thirtieth Street Gang, Grace Street Gang, West End Gang, and Male Orphan Asylum Cats; from Manchester—Terrapin Hill Cats, Baconsville Cats, Goat Hill Cats, Battery Cats, Diamond Hill Cats, Swampoodle Cats, Hull Street Cats, Decatur Street Cats, Oak Grove Cats, Marx’s Field Cats, Belle Isle Cats, and Swansboro Gang.”
― Harry M. Ward, Children of the Streets of Richmond, 1865-1920