Elma > Elma's Quotes

“Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare

“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, i.e., all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants- are things of the past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth"..."who involve the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“The one necessary thing.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Women of color have to not only battle white patriarchy and that of their own culture, but must also contend with colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and other forms of racism. Given white women have never had to deal with racial and colonial oppression, it is not surprising — though it is certainly regrettable — that so many of them still regard feminism as a movement purely concerned with gender, leaving racialized women to keep trying to draw their attention to the ways in which various oppressions affect our lives. Until white women reckon with this, mainstream Western feminism cannot be anything more than another iteration of white supremacy.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This weaponization of White Womanhood continues to be the centerpiece of an arsenal used to maintain the status quo and punish anyone who dares challenge it.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“And so “white damsel” as an archetype was one of racial purity, Christian morality, sexual innocence, demureness, and financial dependence on men all rolled into one. A privilege, yes, but a perilous one, for to step off this pedestal meant no longer being regarded as a “woman.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Women of color are rarely given the benefit of the doubt and even more rarely considered worthy of sympathy and support. If we are angry it is because we are bullies, if we are crying it is because we are indulging in the cult of victimhood, if we are poised it is because we lack emotion, if we are emotional it is because we are less rational human and more primitive animal.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining "punishment" and "being supposed to punish" hurts it, arouses fear in it. "Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?
Punishing itself is terrible." With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born