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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 216713b | Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous .. | conversion convert divine-command-theory divine-right genocide horrors-of-religion killing murder religious-violence | Jonathan Swift | |
| 289b452 | There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof I hope there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of wit or sublime. | humor jonathan-swift writers writing | Jonathan Swift | |
| 910a47c | When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 61bfdcd | how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 51ea453 | Who shall give a lover any law?' Love is a greater law, by my troth, than any law written by mortal man. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| eab70ef | Be nat wrooth, my lord, though that I pleye. Ful ofte in game a sooth I have herd seye! | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| a8552bd | The man who has no wife is no cuckold. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| f8107b6 | Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 8bceb57 | For he would rather have, by his bedside, twenty books, bound in black or red, of Aristotle and his philosophy, than rich robes or costly fiddles or gay harps. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 01b7002 | A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 178.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f7ac06a | Children need fairy tales, but it is just as essential that they have parents who tell them about their own lives, so that they can establish a relationship to the past. | identity legacy | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 928b7ad | In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| c5742e1 | The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 384d09b | If all poor people refused to fight, he argued, the rich would have no army and there would be no war. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 645bc1b | The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 4583044 | As a father, he was generous. More or less. The "less" was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only what he wanted me to have. I found this was often true with philanthropy and with love. The giver's desire and fulfillment played an important role." | Monique Truong | ||
| de133f4 | It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. | politics | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 1bd823d | It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 22cda2a | We've been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2ed7b64 | if you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e80a676 | History is humankind trying to get a grip. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| be59367 | Enough is as good as a feast. And it's when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 61e8067 | We like to blame life for the problems we make, We threaten to change, but it's always a fake; We bitch and moan that everything's wrong, Then we get right back to getting along. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 311a7e8 | The people are suffering. Relieving people's poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate. | poverty suffering | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 6a7e23b | He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists' X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal th.. | science-fiction | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 7c1f141 | If you can't afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 7dc1017 | no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8e71beb | In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| dea2394 | what has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4960fcc | Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since | intelligence | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 793ab75 | Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6c48139 | This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1533ca9 | And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ead77ef | Everyone in California is a Buddhist for fifteen minutes. Then they realize they're not allowed to eat chili dogs and enlightenment starts sounding like a real drag. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| f60707d | Calm down. Deep breaths. Go to your happy place. Oh, wait. I don't have one. | Richard Kadrey | ||
| 6da69cc | Ishmael] listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong here, he had no place in the tree any longer. Some much younger people should find this tree, hold to it tightly as their deepest secret as he and Hatsue had. For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the worl.. | paradox-of-silence unrealized-love | David Guterson | |
| 526e74f | The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded--that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges. | setting | David Guterson | |
| 5b8d970 | If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond. | David Guterson | ||
| 2261544 | And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| e745e4e | There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're i.. | future modern-life today work | Douglas Coupland | |
| c1a62ff | I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I've still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened... | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 102b143 | Aucun representant ne peut exactement representer les besoins d'autrui ; un representant tend a devenir membre d'une certaine elite et jouit souvent de privileges qui erodent l'interet qu'il doit porter aux revendications de ses mandants. Relayee par les elus du systeme representatif, la colere des protestataires perd de sa force ; [...]. Les elus developpent une certaine expertise qui tend a sa propre perpetuation. Les representants passen.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 16696e6 | Aucun changement fonctionnel ou structurel ne peut garantir une societe parfaitement democratique. Nous acceptons mal ce fait parce que nous avons ete eleves dans une culture technologique ou l'on pense generalement que, si on pouvait seulement trouver le bon instrument, tou irait enfin pour le mieux et qu'il serait alors possible de se relacher un peu. Mais on ne peut jamais se relacher. L'experience des Noirs americains, comme celle des I.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 809705c | There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few. | Howard Zinn |