#inc

Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation. ↗

— Adolf Hitler

#principle #renunciation #sacrifice #spirit #thriving

Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#style

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else. ↗

— John Green

#chance #chaos #coincidence #chance

The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#atheism #bible

If you're really a mean person you're going to come back as a fly and eat poop. ↗

— Kurt Cobain

#reincarnation #eating

When Will truly wants something,” said Jem, quietly, “when he feels something — he can break your heart. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#jem-carstairs #will-herondale #feeling

Toys? When a man—a dom—said toys, he didn’t mean stuffed animals or baseballs. ↗

— Cherise Sinclair

#erotica #to-command-and-collar #baseball

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around. ↗

— Criss Jami

#creative #different #difficulties #distinction #envy

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anonymity #born-again #clean-slate #extinction #family

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. ↗

— George Orwell

#english-language #insincerity #english