gromana

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“Sve bi se u životu moglo izdržati za kratko, i da budeš dobar, i hrabar, i pažljiv, ali život ne traje kratko, a ništa ne može postati teško kao obaveza koju sam sebi nametneš u jednom času slabosti ili oduševljenja. Stid te da odustaneš, muka da istraješ, a nemaš koga da psuješ, jer si sam sebe natovario.”
― Meša Selimović, The Fortress