Rose Knapp > Rose's Quotes

“Where am I? Who am I?
How did I come to be here?
What is this thing called the world?
How did I come into the world?
Why was I not consulted?
And If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?
I want to see him.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force... Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.”
― Hypatia

“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”
― John Stuart Mill

“Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato

“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I've had more than one person tell me how courageous and strong I am, how brave and cutting-edge. I'm not any of those things. I'm just another person living my life and trying to make my way in the world, a person who has found out that love is complicated and life is difficult, but that companionship is worth all the king's ransom.”
― Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband

“Thought is the thought of thought.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

“What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”
― Judith Butler

“As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is
also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural
sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture,
a politically neutral surface on which culture acts”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”
― John Rawls

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
― John Rawls

“Luther and Calvin were as dogmatic and intolerant as the Church had been. For those who had to decide whether to become Protestant or to remain Catholic, it was a terrible time. For once the original religion fragments, which religion then leads to salvation?”
― John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy

“There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.”
― Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations

“Maximising the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average.”
― Robert Nozick

“We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on "survival" and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we'll find out soon enough anyway—how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?”
― Robert Nozick, Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Give evil nothing to oppose
and it will disappear by itself.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.
Such is the logic of patriotism.”
― Emma Goldman

“I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”
― Emma Goldman

“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”
― Emma Goldman

“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Thank God for the things that I do not own.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves