#his

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#heinlein #history #starship-troopers #war #communism

For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth....Such are the autumn people. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#something-wicked-this-way-comes #autumn

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. ↗

— Thomas Keneally

#holocaust #injustice #injustice

I cannot say this too strongly: Do not compare yourselves to others. Be true to who you are, and continue to learn with all your might. ↗

— Daisaku Ikeda

#comparison #individuality #success #buddhism

Attachment leads to suffering. ↗

— Gautama Buddha

#buddhism

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. ↗

— Roger Zelazny

#history #humanity #memory #narrative #reality

Whereever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear. ↗

— Shunryu Suzuki

#buddhism

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives. ↗

— Pema Chödrön

#buddhism

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. ↗

— Thích Nhất Hạnh

#knowledge #thich-nhat-hanh #understanding #buddhism

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#buddhism