#ali

It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#personal-essay #story #equality

Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster. ↗

— Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#jinnah #nationality #pakistan #partion #united

We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell? ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#equality

Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all? Stephen Hawking ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#science #equality

We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other. ↗

— Thaddeus Golas

#inspiration #inspirational #inspired #inspiring #philosophy

We are just a certain quantity of cells, all of us! ↗

— Rossana Condoleo

#humanity #inspirational #self #equality

The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#nothing #socialism

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them. ↗

— George Orwell

#socialism

Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or loneliness. It consists in daring to do the right thing and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other. It consists in deeds not words. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#masculinity #personal-responsibility #socialism

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A commercial. You know the awful singsong of blase: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality really can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared scripted. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again. ↗

— Gillian Flynn

#derivative #human #personality-traits #real #secondhand-experience