Hezekiah > Hezekiah's Quotes

“People are almost always unaware that they essentialize; they fail to see their own hands in motion as they carve dividing lines in the natural world.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?

I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them.

I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“In his clinical work with both trans boys and girls at UCLA, however, Newman failed to follow his own words and often ended up overseeing transitions for his child patients, precisely because such “intensive individual therapy for the child and counseling for the family” had absolutely no anti-trans effect. He tended to see the onset of adolescence as the practical threshold at which there was no point in pursuing psychotherapy anymore to change a patient’s gender identity. “Georgina,” one of the trans girls he saw regularly in the 1960s, therefore began to live full time as a girl when she turned fifteen. With Newman’s guidance as supervising psychiatrist, as well as the permission of her parents and school officials, she was able to transfer to a new school in the Los Angeles area, legally change her name, and complete high school as Georgina, while continuing to visit UCLA for estrogen therapy.”
― Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

“No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one has seen an eel fertilize the eggs of another eel; no one has managed to breed European eels in captivity. We think we know that all eels are hatched in the Sargasso Sea, since that’s where the smallest examples of the willow leaf–like larvae have been found, but no one knows for certain why the eel insists on reproducing there and only there. No one knows for certain how it withstands the rigors of its long return journey, or how it navigates. It’s thought all eels die shortly after breeding, since no living eels have ever been found after breeding season, but then again, no mature eel, living or dead, has ever been observed at their supposed breeding ground. Put another way, no human has ever seen an eel in the Sargasso Sea. Nor can anyone fully comprehend the purpose of the eel’s many metamorphoses. No one knows how long eels can live for. In other words, more than two thousand years after Aristotle, the eel remains something of a scientific enigma, and in many ways, it has become a symbol of what is sometimes referred to as the metaphysical.”
― Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World — A Natural History

“Danish businessman and philanthropist Djaffar Shalchi put it even more memorably: “Wealth is like manure: spread it, and it makes everything grow; pile it up, and it stinks.”
― Bryn Nelson, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure

“Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“Nunc fluens facit tempus,
nunc stans facit aeternitatum.

(The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“Love binds people too, in matrimony's sacred bonds where chaste lovers are met, and friends cement their trust and friendship. How happy is mankind, if the love that orders the stars above rules, too, in your hearts.”
― Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“As far as possible, join faith to reason.”
― Boethius

“No man is rich who shakes and groans
Convinced that he needs more.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“Let the rich man increase his hoard—it is never enough. All that gold, and all those Red Sea pearls that hang from his pudgy neck, they only weigh him down. Out in his fields, hundreds of oxen plough, but still the furrows of care are deep in his creased brow, and he worries about those riches he can’t take with him.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.”
― Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

“Ill Fortune is of more use to men than Good Fortune.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“But it is said, when a man comes to high office, that makes him worthy of honour and respect. Surely such offices don’t have the power of planting virtue in the minds of those who hold them, do they? Or of removing vices? No: the opposite is true. More often than removing wickedness, high office brings it to light, and this is the reason why we are angry at seeing how often high office has devolved upon the most wicked of men –why Catullus calls Nonius a kind of malignant growth, in spite of the office he held.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“Weight-loss methods aren’t marketed as diets but as “lifestyle changes,” “detoxes,” “cleanses,” and “cognitive behavioral therapy.” That shifting language allows the weight-loss industry to cloak its same old diets in the languages of holistic wellness and self-care. We may talk about diets differently today, but social mandates to become thin are as strong as ever.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Adults, whether anti-trans hate groups, trans exclusionary feminists, conservative activists, parents, so-called interested observers, or even allies and advocates, tarry within the dangerously limiting circumstances of a system that continues to assay the value of trans children’s being in terms not of their humanity and personhood but via questions absurd in their abstraction for how they ask us instead to wonder if trans children “prove something” about the biological basis of sex and gender or how identity politics have so injured a cis, white, heteronormative imaginary that cannot fathom the obvious fragility of its claims to universalism in the face of a defiant no.”
― Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

“Trans children have been reduced to figures for what they are so clearly not, abstract ciphers of this or that etiology of gender, this or that political platform. Trans childhood, under such circumstances, has yet to visit us. Yet trans children already exist, left to fend for themselves in a culture that suffers from being unable to imagine children with a richly expressive sense of who they are.”
― Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

“For me, pressure to lose weight from thin loved ones hurt more than even the harshest jibes from strangers or the cruelest internet trolls. It’s easy to disregard strangers: we know one another for only moments at a time. Few things sting like rejection from those we love most, or conditional love offered with the insistence that they just want to help. “I love you” doesn’t ring so true when it’s followed by “I just want to fix you.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Essentialism inoculates itself against counterevidence. It also changes the way science is practiced. If scientists believe in a world of essences that are waiting to be discovered, then they devote themselves to finding those essences, a potentially endless quest.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“What is true of whiteness in every space, even in “progressive” and “inclusive” spaces, is that it will always work to create some form of exclusivity as a means to reassert white superiority. Therefore, white asexuals often claim asexual queerness as a property, just as whiteness itself is claimed as a property, as a space that others are barred from entering into.”
― Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
― Murray Bookchin

“There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.”
― Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

“Right now, as your eyes scan across this page, you are harboring more microbes than human cells. The entity that is “you” is a collection of microorganisms and cells cooperating to look like and function as a “human being.”
― Theresa MacPhail, Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World

“Almost all of the people who have allegedly been “canceled” continue to thrive professionally, and almost all who were publicly condemned for their speech or actions had opportunities to show evidence of real repentance work but chose not to.”
― Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World

“the theory that sugar can induce hyperactivity or any other kind of high isn’t supported by the research. The notion that sugar intake could lead to what was then called “the neurotic child” was first proposed in the medical literature in 1922, and later gained popularity during the 1970s, when researchers were first studying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But these early studies failed to control for many other factors that we know now can play a role in a child’s ADHD management, including their sleep schedule, parents’ stress levels, and genetics.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

“The result: None of the kids, even the “sugar-sensitive” ones, showed any meaningful differences after following each diet. “Even when the intake exceeds typical dietary levels, neither dietary sucrose nor aspartame affects children’s behavior or cognitive function,” the researchers concluded. The “sugar high” had been officially debunked. The 1994 results have been replicated in several subsequent studies and yet—I’ve never attended a child’s birthday party where someone didn’t invoke the specter of the sugar high as soon as the cake is cut.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

“We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.”
― Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935

“Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously "born" in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks