James > James's Quotes

“Chorus:
The Kings are our dear fathers
Under whose care we live in peace
The Kings are our dear fathers
Under whose care we live in peace
Marat:
And the children repeated the lesson they believed it
As anyone believes
What they hear over and over again
And over and over again the priests said
Our love embraces all mankind
Of every colour race and creed
Our love is international universal
We are all brothers every one
And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice
And they turned their faces away and said
Our Kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world
Our life on earth is out a pilgrimage
The soul lives on humility and patience
At the same time screwing from the poor their last centime
They settled down among their treasures
And ate and drank with princes
And to the starving they said
Suffer
Suffer as he suffered on the cross
For it is the will of God
And anyone believes what they hear over and over again
So the poor instead of bread made do with a picture
Of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ
And prayed to that image of their helplessness
And the priests said
Raise your hands to heaven bend your knees
And bear your suffering without complaint
For prayer and blessing are the only stairways
Which you can climb to Paradise
And so they chained down the poor in their ignorance
So that they wouldn't stand up and fight their bosses
Who ruled in the name of the lie of divine right
Chorus:
Amen”
― Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

“Now? Why now? Why am I missing her now, Frankie? Why not then? When she was there? Why am I afraid that I'm gonna' lose her when she's already gone. And this fear--this fear swarms through me--floods my whole body 'til there's nothing left. Nothing left of me. And then it turns--it turns to a fear for my whole life. Like my whole life is lost from losing her. Gone. That I'll die like this. Lost. Just lost.”
― Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind

“We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“the millions paid every year to officials of all sorts, whose function it is to maintain the rights of minorities — the right, that is, of a few rich men — to manipulate the economic activities of the nation; the millions spent on judges, prisons, policemen, and all the paraphernalia of so-called justice — spent to no purpose, because we know that every alleviation, however slight, of the wretchedness of our great cities is followed by a very considerable diminution of crime;”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“Nothing yet has been accomplished Meanwhile the people suffer. The factories are idle, the workshops closed; industry is at a standstill. The worker does not even earn the meagre wage which was his before. Food goes up in price. With that heroic devotion which has always characterized them, and which in great crises reaches the sublime, the people wait patiently.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“The mitigated individualism of the collectivist system certainly could not maintain itself alongside a partial communism”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“So the poor wretches swarm over the baron’s lands, making roads, draining marshes, building villages. In nine years he begins to tax them. Five years later he increases the rent. Then he doubles it. The peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones elsewhere; and little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord’s wealth. And it is not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers swoop down upon the villages, multiplying as the wretchedness of the peasants increases. That is how things went in the Middle Ages. And to-day is it not still the same thing?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“The Doctor: You betrayed me. You betrayed my trust, you betrayed our friendship, you betrayed everything I ever stood for. You let me down!
Clara: Then why are you helping me?
The Doctor: Why? Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?”
― Dark Water (Series 8)

“Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”
― Audre Lorde

“To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception