#oral

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence. ↗

— N. Scott Momaday

#oral-tradition #writing #attitude

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#ethical #grief #jodi-picoult #life #moral

Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you. ↗

— Doreen Valiente

#virtues #wicca #beauty

I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is. ↗

— Katherine Boo

#morality #beauty

As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.) ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#civilisation #courage #enemies #fathers #humour

Jan could not recall ever seeing a creature more beautiful, though there nagged somewhere at the back of his mind the notion that she ought to have seemed hideous. Why? For she was pure, admirably pure, without a twinge of conscience or shame. ↗

— Meredith Ann Pierce

#immorality #shameless #beauty

People who worry that nuclear weaponry will one day fall in the hands of the Arabs, fail to realize that the Islamic bomb has been dropped already, it fell the day MUHAMMED (pbuh) was born. ↗

— - Dr. Joseph Adam Pearson.

#amazing #arabs #atomic #atomic-bomb #beautiful

If we don't believe in moral absolutes and then we get into a cultural-political debate, how are we going to win? ↗

— Randall Terry

#debate #get #going #how #into

My father used to tease me at the table by implying that “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than them, slow to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this. ↗

— Marina Keegan

#beauty

Is it a small thing to quench the flames of hell with the holy tears of pity -- to unbind the martyr from the stake -- break all the chains -- put out the fires of civil war -- stay the sword of the fanatic, and tear the bloody hands of the Church from the white throat of Science? Is it a small thing to make men truly free -- to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power -- the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of the earth the fiend of fear? ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#freedom #goodness #kindness #liberty #morality