Samuel > Samuel's Quotes

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“All warfare is based on deception.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Irony and cynicism are the killers of possibility and I'm more about what's possible.”
― Michael Gira, interview with The Guardian

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“It was a kind of sado-masochism. I would take the things that were painful to me and elevate them and, through the mantra of music, make them into a release.”
― Michael Gira

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I remember you was conflicted
Misusing your influence
Sometimes I did the same
Abusing my power, full of resentment
Resentment that turned into a deep depression
Found myself screaming in the hotel room
I didn’t wanna self destruct
The evils of Lucy was all around me
So I went running for answers
Until I came home
But that didn’t stop survivor’s guilt
Going back and forth trying to convince myself the stripes I earned
Or maybe how A-1 my foundation was
But while my loved ones was fighting the continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one
A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination
Made me wanna go back to the city and tell the homies what I learned
The word was respect
Just because you wore a different gang color than mine's
Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man
Forgetting all the pain and hurt we caused each other in these streets
If I respect you, we unify and stop the enemy from killing us
But I don’t know, I’m no mortal man, maybe I’m just another nigga”
― Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly

“I'd say I'm just in a state when I'm up there and-... and what I do when I'm up there is just what I do when I'm up there. I'm not putting a lot of thought into it, y'know? I think that would make it contrived.

I like the feeling of the way he plays the drums. Makes me feel good. Makes me, uh, get into it y'know?”
― Ride (Stefan Burnett)

“The last time I saw you, you had left the hotel room, I said "please be safe" & you replied "I will"
Then I watched you walk down the street from the window looking down at your phone. the second you left, I felt an immense dread I felt thinking if this was our final goodbye. Something I would always dread. I never wanted to let you go.
Or the times I had to catch my flight back home, & leave Sydney & Melbourne after spending the week with you. Knowing I had to come back to my personal hell, away from you, worrying sick whether you'll be safe, whether I would be able to do something, anything at all if you ever needed me. & on each of those departures, we never got to have one last long hug, one final kiss, & the last chance to say "I love you"
I was scared because I always felt as if I took this time for granted. because the uncomfortable truth is this.

There's always the last time.
There's always a never again.”
― Sewerslvt, all the joy in life was gone once you left

“That's how I've felt about making this music, as an act of destroying myself, & for what, peoples mild amusement? longing for things to go wrong? fame & fortune? I'm not sure anymore. anything I do or say will be viewed by thousands of people, picked apart, criticised by people who think it's in any way at all important. It's hardly a spotlight, it's a magnifying glass under the sun.
I never expected things to have been this way, when I was younger I wanted to be the next GG Alin, but more importantly, stay underground, stay unknown, & keep this as a hobby only, push the boundaries, piss people off, black metal aesthetic, etc. & anyone who questioned it can get the finger. But then I grew up, I matured, & saw the world differently, I changed. But the internet is the internet, & Ive been paying for those mistakes by the pound.
These things I've done that I regret & have done my best to atone for, simply won't matter, not when people show no forgiveness & want nothing but blood to pay the debts. & blood is what they will get, & even then I'm not sure it will be enough.
Even in saying this, even by coming back at all, It feels like I'm just lighting myself on fire & then watch all the moths come towards me. I sometimes get asked what's it's like to be famous, a thought which never occurs to me but whenever people ask I look at my numbers & realise how far I've come, & I don't feel pride, I feel paranoid, I feel threatened. that's how many people are watching you now.
& every time I tell them the same thing.

Don't ever be famous, It destroys you, I hate being me.”
― Sewerslvt, self destruction worldwide broadcast

“We need to weigh the risk that revolutionary violence will spin out of control and lead to sadistic mayhem, against the risk that our own complacency with the injustices of the status quo will make us quiet enablers of more subtle but equally unjust forms of violence.”
― ContraPoints

“I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle”
― Kanye West

“Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you”
― Kanye West

“I'll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.”
― kanye West

“The problems we face, did not come down from the heavens. They are made, they are made by bad human decisions, and good human decisions can change them.”
― Bernie Sanders

“And let me make the radical statement that I don’t believe that you can say something profound in the 140 characters that make up a tweet.”
― Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In