Ethan Henry > Ethan's Quotes

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“As always in the past, one can choose to be a democrat in Jefferson's sense, or an aristocrat. The latter path offers rich rewards, given the locus of wealth, privilege and power, and the ends it naturally seeks. The other path is one of struggle, often defeat, but also rewards that cannot be imagined by those who succumb to 'the New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute.”
― Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home

“I have no particular love for the idealized “worker” as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
― George Orwell, Homage To Catalonia / Down And Out In Paris And London

“Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making”
― Emma Goldman, Anarquismo: lo que realmente significa

“If this is an elite, then, it is an insecure and deeply anxious one. It is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide. But in the middle class there is another anxiety: a fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will. Even the affluence that is so often the goal of all this striving becomes a threat, for it holds out the possibility of hedonism and self-indulgence. Whether the middle class looks down upon the realm of less, or up toward the realm of more, there is the fear, always, of falling.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

“Let me interpolate by saying that, as I understand an economy, its ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods. This is the goal. This is the object of everything that we are working at: to produce things for consumers.”
― Raymond J. Saulnier

“In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“My last Christmas toy drive in Compton handed out eulogies
Not because the rags in the park had red gradient
But because the high blood pressure flooded the caterin'
So what's the difference 'tween your life when hidin' motives?
More fatalities and reality brung you closure
The noble person that goes to work and pray like they 'posed to?
Slaughter people too, your murder's just a bit slower”
― Kendrick Lamar

“Be ruthless with systems; be kind to people.”
― Michael Brooks

“- I don't want to be a loser

- Back up a minute. You know what a loser is? A real loser is somebody that's so afraid of not winning they don't even try”
― Little Miss Sunshine

“The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
― Albert Camus

“Practice without thought is blind. Thought without practice is empty.

(note: Two versions of this do not cite the book and are not exact. Action is not part of the equation.)”
― Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development

“We be reading Marx where I'm from”
― Digable Planets

“Moving backward isn't always backsliding; perhaps it's a moonwalk.”
― Bianca McCarty