Marhta Donten > Marhta's Quotes

“In our nation’s popular culture, country life in the 1800s has often been portrayed as an idyllic experience, one that cultivated such quintessentially American values as self-reliance, rugged independence, a reverence for the land, a belief in the importance of hard work and self-sacrifice, and a willingness to fight when necessary for home, family, and community.”
― Harold Schechter, The Pirate

“There is meaning and purpose in not surrendering in the face of loss, but instead working to bind up wounds, ease pain, and spare others what you have seen. Our obligation, our duty, is to ensure that something good comes from suffering, that we find some kind of gift in good-bye. Not to somehow, perversely, make the loss “worth it.” Nothing will ever justify some losses, but we can survive, even thrive, if we channel grief into purpose and never allow evil to hold the field. In that mission lie the beauty and genius of our justice system.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Years ago, Re had raged against humans for violating Ma’at, so he had sent Hathor to destroy mankind. She transformed into the lion goddess Sekhmet and Egypt’s fields ran red with the blood of her rampage. Seeing this, Re realized his mistake and ordered Sekhmet to stop, but she was too gone with bloodlust to listen. Knowing he had to halt her some other way, Re stained seven thousand jugs of beer with pomegranate juice and poured the red liquid into her path. Believing the beer to be blood, Sekhmet gorged herself and passed out in a drunken stupor. When she awoke, her bloodlust had passed and she returned to being Hathor. Thus the goddesses of love and violence shared a common history.”
― Stephanie Thornton, Daughter of the Gods: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

“The Moon would shine as brightly as the midmorning sun, and by the end of the two minutes, the lunar regolith would be heated to a glow.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—”
― jon ronson

“Musk sampled a handful of ideologies and then ended up more or less back where he had started, embracing the sci-fi lessons found in one of the most influential books in his life: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“Fate would have it that the timing of your birth determines your measure of luck. You’re either born lucky or you’re not, though the only way to know for sure is to test it. The problem with that is most people find out they’re not lucky at the worst possible moment, usually in the throes of death or arrest.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia

“Several Indiana communities seemed seized by a perverse envy. When rumors spread that “a new ‘death farm’ where Mrs. Belle Gunness buried many of her victims” had been discovered near Warsaw, “the citizens of that place were thrown into a fever excitement” and appeared crestfallen when the story proved false.[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“So, when I read of a recent study that found that children are significantly more inclined to eat “difficult” foods like liver, spinach, broccoli—and other such hard-to-sell “but-it’s-good-for-you” classics—when they are wrapped in comfortingly bright packages from McDonald’s, I was at first appalled, and then … inspired. Rather than trying to co-opt Ronald’s all-too-effective credibility among children to short-term positive ends, like getting my daughter to eat the occasional serving of spinach, I could reverse-engineer this! Use the strange and terrible powers of the Golden Arches for good—not evil! I plan to dip something decidedly unpleasant in an enticing chocolate coating and then wrap it carefully in McDonald’s wrapping paper. Nothing dangerous, mind you, but something that a two-and-a-half-year-old will find “yucky!”—even upsetting—in the extreme. Maybe a sponge soaked with vinegar. A tuft of hair. A Barbie head. I will then place it inside the familiar cardboard box and leave it—as if forgotten—somewhere for my daughter to find. I might even warn her, “If you see any of that nasty McDonald’s … make sure you don’t eat it!” I’ll say, before leaving her to it. “Daddy was stupid and got some chocolate … and now he’s lost it…” I might mutter audibly to myself before taking a long stroll to the laundry room. An early, traumatic, Ronald-related experience can only be good for her.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question. The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true.”
― Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

“Fortitudine vincimus—“By endurance we conquer.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“I don’t understand why people keep pushing that “Don’t be some random person. BE UNIQUE” message. You’re already incredibly unique. Everyone is incredibly unique. That’s why the police use fingerprints to identify people. So you’re incredibly unique … but in the exact same way that everyone else is. (Which, admittedly, doesn’t really sing and is never going to make it on a motivational T-shirt.) So none of us are unique in being unique because being unique is pretty much the least unique thing you can be, because it comes naturally to everyone. So perhaps instead of “BE UNIQUE” we should be saying, “Be as visibly fucked up as you want to be because being unique is already taken.” By everyone, ironically enough. Or maybe we should change the message to “Don’t just be some random person. Be the MOST random person.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”
― Naomi Klein

“Also, we decided that people who can afford giant bags of cocaine should really be embarrassed at leaving anything less than a cool hundy in the tip jar.”
― Lauren Graham, Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between

“Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. (p.183)”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Few know it, but the Devil rewards insurrection. After all, rebellion is the original sin, and he did conceive it.”
― Tanya Thompson

“In the incident of her husband’s death, her temptation to commit the alleged atrocities may have had its birth.”[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“I would like people to stop pressuring children to make friends. Friendships can’t be artificially created.”
― Naoki Higashida, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism

“Suppose a hole were dug from one side of Earth, through the center, and out the other side. What would happen to a man if he jumped into the hole? When he got to the middle of the Earth would he keep falling or would he stop? DEBBIE CANDLER RED BUD, ILLINOIS He would be vaporized by the 11,000° Fahrenheit temperature of the pressurized molten iron core. Ignoring this complication, he would gain speed continuously from the moment he jumped into the hole until he reached the center of Earth where the force of gravity is zero. But he will be traveling so fast that he will overshoot the center and slow down continuously until he reached zero velocity at the exact moment he emerges on the other side. Unless somebody grabs him, he will fall back down the hole and repeat his journey indefinitely. A one-way trip through Earth would take about forty-five minutes.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Merlin's Tour of the Universe: A Skywatcher's Guide to Everything from Mars and Quasars to Comets, Planets, Blue Moons, and Werewolves

“man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“But I don't think building sand castles in the air is such a terrible thing to do, as long as you don't take it too seriously.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Not all of Anthony’s officers, however, were eager or even willing to join Chivington’s well-planned massacre. Captain Silas Soule, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, and Lieutenant James Connor protested that an attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful camp would violate the pledge of safety given the Indians by both Wynkoop and Anthony, “that it would be murder in every sense of the word,” and any officer participating would dishonor the uniform of the Army.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“To reiterate, no matter how much pepper you eat, it won’t undo the ludicrous amount of salt you ate before it.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“M. Night Shyamalan can’t be stopped. And for some reason, neither can I. Nudity”
― Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody

“It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it. I have been rehabilitated now, so don’t be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child.”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”
― Christopher Hitchens