Thanh > Thanh's Quotes

“I came to Australia as a damaged grown up adult, and it took me years to heal, so my perspective of the national Australian pride is not full. It [assimilation] penetrates, it’s
accepted, it’s tolerated, and I think the third generation it is absorbed. I don’t know about the second generation, - Holocaust survivor, Kitia Altman”
― Peter Brune, Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66

“It is time to stop drinking the Kool-Aid, get off the cruise-ship church, jump into the battleship Church and start moving into the purpose and destiny that God has for you.”
― John Ramirez, Conquer Your Deliverance: How to Live a Life of Total Freedom

“Dancer and Waif sprinted toward the edge. Picking up speed. Bad Ass on his one real leg doing a great job of keeping up. Kind of.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“The Wallace-Ali relationship reflects the great mythic “hero’s journey.” Wallace might be seen as the Mentor/Wise Old Man, Ali as the naïve young hero who grows as the story evolves.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“We will bring humanity across the vast Saharas of emptiness between the stars and create a dynamic, perpetually advancing empire that spans galaxies, universes, and realities. Just as our ancestors wove fabric from organic matter, our descendants will weave the fabric of reality. Humanity’s descendants will be entities beyond our wildest conceptions of the divine. Omnipotence and the ability to create universes will be the least of their powers. Whether they are good or evil—whether they even come to be at all—is up to us. In that sense, we have even more power than they do.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“The role of dominance and submission in human sexuality cannot be overstated. Our survey suggests that the majority (over 50%) of humans are very aroused by either acting out or witnessing dominance or submission. But it gets crazier than that: While 45% of women taking our survey said they found the naked male form to be very arousing and 48% said they found the sight of a penis to very arousing, a heftier 53% said they found their partner acting dominant in a sexual context to be very arousing. Dominance is literally more likely to be very arousing to the average female than naked men or penises. To say: “Dominance and submission are tied to human arousal patterns” is more of an understatement than saying: “Penises are tied to human arousal patterns.”

We have a delectable theory about what is going on here: If you look at all the emotional states that frequently get tied to arousal pathways, the vast majority of them seem to be proxies for behaviors that would have been associated with our pre-human ancestors’ and early humans’ dominance and submission displays. For example, things like humiliation, being taken advantage of, chains, being used, being useful, being constrained, a lack of freedom, being prey, and a lack of free will may all have been concepts and emotions important in early human submission displays.

We posit that most of the time when a human is turned on by a strange emotional concept—being bound for instance—their brain is just using that concept as a proxy for a pre-human submission display and lighting up the neural pathways associated with it, creating a situation in which it looks like a large number of random emotional states are turning humans on, when in reality they all boil down to just a fuzzy outline of dominance and submission. Heck, speaking of binding as a submission display, there were similar ritualized submission displays in the early middle ages, in which a vassal would present their hands clasped in front of their lord and allow the lord to hold their clasped hands in a way that rendered them unable to unclasp them (this submission display to one’s lord is where the symbolism of the Christian kneeling and hands together during prayer ritual comes from). We suspect the concept of binding and defenselessness have played important roles in human submission displays well into pre-history. Should all this be the case, why on earth have our brains been hardwired to bind (hehe) our recognition of dominance and submission displays to our sexual arousal systems?!?”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality

“Throughout the process, you must show gratitude to those who have helped you get to where you are.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“You’ve just had an order from your Commander in Chief,” Haig said. Watts could not resign. “Fuck you, Al,” Watts said. “I just did.” Kissinger called his staff together in the Executive Office Building to plead for their support of the decision. “We are all the President’s men,” he said, “and we’ve got to behave that way.”
― Carl Bernstein, The Final Days

“I sat. And I thought. And the more I thought, connecting the events in my life, the more my heart collapsed.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“But if I am to go, I am to go, and there’s the end of it. Karma. She turned her mind off the inevitable to the immediate problem”
― James Clavell, Shōgun: The Epic Novel of Japan

“I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?" (15-17)”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“I hope these words will be of some help and comfort to those who read them.
Nobody knows when they will be tested and there are no right or wrong answers, we are all of us lost when tragedy comes to call. All we can ever do is to be there, give love and do the best we can, often that is all it needs.”
― Peter B. Forster, More Than Love, A Husband's Tale