Leon van den Berg > Leon's Quotes

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#1

“I love my country, not my government.”
― Jesse Ventura

tags: allegiance, bill-of-rights, constitution, despotism, freedom, government, jesse-ventura, libertarianism, liberty, martial-law, nationalism, patriot, patriotic, patriotism, police-state, ron-paul, totalitarianism

229 likes

#2

“Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.”
― Jesse Ventura

33 likes

#3

“Remember something, if you will, about voting: Voting is not a horse race, you're not going there thinking "Gee, I gotta pick the winner so I can brag to my friends 'Oh, I picked so-and-so and he or she won'". Voting is voting your heart and voting your conscience and when you've done that, don't ever, EVER let a Democrat or Republican tell you that you've wasted your vote because the fact is, if you DON'T vote your heart and conscience then you HAVE wasted your vote.”
― Jesse Ventura

53 likes

#4

“I have an idea about voting, how about on every ballot we include "None of the above". People may laugh at that, but what that is, it is a vote of no confidence in your government and I'm willing to bet that in some elections, 'None of the Above' would win. Imagine if you won the election but lost to 'None of the Above'. Wouldn't that make you re-think your positions?”
― Jesse Ventura

36 likes

#5

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
― Joe Klaas, The Twelve Steps to Happiness: A Practical Handbook for Understanding and Working the Twelve Step Programs for Alcoholism, Codependency, Eating Disorders, and Other Addictions

tags: anger, freedom, misattributed-gloria-steinem, truth

13228 likes

#6

“Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

tags: animal-kindness, animals, cats, cats-being-needed, dogs, dogs-and-cats, invasive-species, narcissism, selfishness, sociopath, sociopathology, sociopathy

81 likes

#7

“I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.”
― Brad Leithauser

tags: astronomer, astronomy, chile, metaphor, novelists, telescope, writers, writing, writing-craft, writing-life

4 likes

#8

“Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.”
― Desmond Tutu

32 likes

#9

“The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.”
― Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

26 likes

#10

“A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

tags: feminism

117 likes

#11

“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

233 likes

#12

“If there be any among those common objects of hatred which I can safely say I doe contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra; it is no breach of Charity to call these fooles; it is the stile all holy Writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonicall Scripture, and a point of our faith to beleeve so.”
― Thomas Browne, Religio Medici / Urne-Buriall

tags: comforting, elitism, misanthropy, the-internet

6 likes

#13

“...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).”
― Karl Marx , Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877

tags: american, english, equality, feminism, french, history, humor, labor-union, progress, social-change

156 likes

#14

“Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.”
― John Taylor Gatto

tags: children, education, self-awareness

41 likes

#15

“It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen "in here" or "out there" but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

tags: argument, creativity, genius, intersection, relationship, spaces

2 likes

#16

“All mothers breed dead children.”
― Mie Hansson, Where Pain Thrives

tags: attitude-toward-life, choice-and-attitude, empowerment, genius-writers, ignorance-is-bliss, independence, inspirational-quotes, maturity, poetry

8 likes

#17

“When it comes to sex: some men treat women as objects; some women treat objects as men.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

tags: dating, dildos, marriage, masturbation, objects, relationships, sex, vibrators

16 likes

#18

“We are but a bunch of neurons.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

tags: mind, mind-body-connection, neurology, neuroscience

1 likes

#19

“Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool”
― Plato

tags: indoctrination, propaganda, schooling, state-schools, statism

50 likes

#20

“Only one kind of species of animals bites the hand that feeds them - mankind.”
― Fakeer Ishavardas

tags: good-and-evil, human-nature, lifestyle-quotes, people-nature, philosophical-musings, philosophy-quotes, psychology-quotes, wellness-guru

2 likes

#21

“Don't tell me from genetics. What've they got to do with it?" said Crowley. "Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you're going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he'll grow up to be a demon just because his dad _became_ one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

tags: antichrist, genetics, lamarckian-evolution, nature-vs-nurture, satan

66 likes

#22

“(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964)
"How do you find America?"
"Turn left at Greenland.”
― Ringo Starr

tags: america, beatles, geography, greenland, humor, media, wordplay

723 likes

#23

“After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

tags: anxiety, happiness, love, torment

1216 likes

#24

“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

tags: atheism, belief, blind, blind-faith, blindness, christian-faith, christian-miracle, critical-thinking, critical-thought, death-of-reason, doubt, doubt-is-sin, eternity, existence, foundation-of-belief, human-nature, intoxication, meaning, meaning-of-life, metaphor, miracle, myth, nature, origin, philosophy, purpose, purpose-of-life, reason, reflection, religious-faith, resurrection, resurrection-of-jesus, sin, sinful, thinking, thoughts, wasted-life

1103 likes

#25

“Education is political.”
― Noel Castree, Questioning Geography: Fundamental Debates

tags: degree, education, geography, higher-education, political, politics, university

3 likes

#26

“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

tags: conscience, life, sadness

554 likes

#27

“Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

61 likes

#28

“Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

tags: awareness, consciousness, corruption, dangerous, impact, mass-media, masses-destruction, media, mind, persistent, psychology, radar, society, subtle, subtlety, unconscious, unconscious-mind, unfortunate

45 likes

#29

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

tags: government, guns, military, military-budget, politics, poverty, war, weapons

1288 likes

#30

“I don't know about your true form, but the weight of your ego sure is pushing the crust of the earth toward the breaking point.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

tags: ego, ferro, harry-dresden, humor, sarcasm

169 likes

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