#evolution

Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#changes #democracy #change

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#independence #independent-thought #inspirational #liberty #revolution

Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them. Pg. 193 ↗

— Nien Cheng

#cultural-revolution #mao-zedong #propaganda #death

From the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest casualties of the Cultural Revolution were the Party’s prestige and its ability to govern. Pg. 539 ↗

— Nien Cheng

#communist-party-of-china #cultural-revolution #death

While I listened to the words of homage to Mao, I remembered Mao’s awesome power, like a blanket over China threatening to smother whomever he chose. Pg. 218 ↗

— Nien Cheng

#cultural-revolution #mao #death

As I gazed at Mao’s face wearing what was intended as a benign expression but was in fact a smirk of self-satisfaction, I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate. Pg. 259 ↗

— Nien Cheng

#cultural-revolution #mao #propaganda #death

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments." [On Water] ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#government #people #punishment #retribution #revolts

The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action. ↗

— Malcolm X

#awareness #change #education #knowledge #revolution

Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#psychology #education

You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation. ↗

— John Green

#failure #side-effects #van-houten-being-a-douche #experience