J.M. Duke > J.M.'s Quotes

“That’s right. People. It’s all people. People and their stupid fucking groups. Show me an individual decision maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I’ll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I’ll take them all down if I can. But don’t expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels

“Reality has its own power—you can turn your back on it, but it will find you in the end, and your inability to cope with it will be your ruin.”
― 50 Cent, The 50th Law

“Now is the time to stop drifting and wake up—to assess yourself, the people around you, and the direction in which you are headed in as cold and brutal a light as possible. Without fear.”
― 50 Cent, The 50th Law

“Understand: as an individual you cannot stop the tide of fantasy and escapism sweeping a culture. But you can stand as an individual bulwark to this trend and create power for yourself. You were born with the greatest weapon in all of nature—the rational, conscious mind. It has the power to expand your vision far and wide, giving you the unique capacity to distinguish patterns in events, learn from the past, glimpse into the future, see through appearances. Circumstances are conspiring to dull that weapon and render it useless by turning you inward and making you afraid of reality.
Consider it war. You must fight this tendency as best you can and move in the opposite direction. You must turn outward and become a keen observer of all that is around you. You are doing battle against all the fantasies that are thrown at you. You are tightening your connection to the environment. You want clarity, not escape and confusion. Moving in this direction will instantly bring you power among so many dreamers.”
― Robert Greene, The 50th Law: Overcoming Adversity Through Fearlessness

“The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”
― Robert Greene, The 50th Law: Overcoming Adversity Through Fearlessness

“Your fears are a kind of prison that confines you within a limited range of action. The less you fear, the more power you will have and the more fully you will live.”
― Robert Greene, The 50th Law: Overcoming Adversity Through Fearlessness

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don’t pray, don’t wish, don’t buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don’t give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act. QUELLCRIST”
― Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels

“If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“But this principle is based on a more profound philosophical idea—that no matter how certain you may be that you are in possession of the truth, you have no right to impose your belief on society as a whole.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“And I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others. ”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.”
― James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife

“When one has let go of that great hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one's own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, "Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can," then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.”
― James Hollis, The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other

“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
― Selwyn Duke

“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”
― Albert Camus

“The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous. When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple: The professionals know they’re winging it. The amateurs pretend they’re not.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“A farmer is sitting on his porch in a chair, hanging out.
A friend walks up to the porch to say hello, and hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from inside the house.
"What's that terrifyin' sound?" asks the friend.
"It's my dog," said the farmer. "He's sittin' on a nail."
"Why doesn't he just sit up and get off it?" asks the friend.
The farmer deliberates on this and replies:
"Doesn't hurt enough yet.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Eat the pain. Send it back into the void as love.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos