Anthony Stillo > Anthony's Quotes

“Dismissing addictions as “bad habits” or “self-destructive behaviour” comfortably hides their functionality in the life of the addict. It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Either the minds of animals are not like ours, in which case the experiments are unlikely to benefit us and there is less justification for funding and carrying them out; or else the animals do have minds like ours, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed

“A society which makes eating a privilege, not a right, has no right to exist.”
― Jerry Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution

“You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting. You're welcome.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard

“The very essence of the opiate high was expressed by a twenty-seven-year-old sex-trade worker. She had HIV and has since died. “The first time I did heroin,” she said to me, “it felt like a warm, soft hug.” In that phrase she told her life story and summed up the psychological and chemical cravings of all substance-dependent addicts.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“No one gives up his privileges without strong resistance.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“In some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty. ”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried. It well has been said: “A religion that ends with the individual, ends.”
― Clayborne Carson, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective’, as ‘a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“If SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have ranked seventh for CO2 emissions.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Even the reverend did: visiting Martin Luther King in his parsonage, soon after his home had been bombed, a journalist was about to sink into an armchair when he was alerted to a couple of loaded guns on it. ‘Just for self-defence,’ King explained.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“In the aftermath of the Second World War, a massive experiment in humanity began, one that is still happening. This is the human rights wave born in the horrors of the Second World War. It came from a profound belief shared by men and women all over the world after the war - the new understanding that all people deserve to be treated with dignity, that we are all human, and that there is no honour and never and excuse for oppression based on race, religion, culture, or colour.”
― Jean Teillet, The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Metis Nation

“But government rarely acts on the basis of need, want, fact, or logic.”
― Jean Teillet, The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Metis Nation

“Women non-combatants always see battles from a different perspective. Not in the battlefield and consigned to waiting, they find things to do. Anything to feel useful, to stave off the helpless feeling that the men you love might be dead or dying. It's a woman's way to measure a battle, by the length of time it takes to wash your floor.”
― Jean Teillet, The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Metis Nation

“The power structure automatically imposes a frame of reference which force people to see things from the Man's point of view. When a policeman shoots a nigger, that's 'law and order.' But when a black man defends himself against a pig, that's 'violence.' The role of the revolutionary is to create public theatre which creates a revolutionary frame of reference. The power to define is the power to control.”
― Jerry Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution

“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“people jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from the habit—not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. The drive is that relentless.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“What is addiction, really?” the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller asks. “It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Don't you understand? Listen carefully to what I'm saying. If you do, you'll get it. you can grasp this easily. In short...in short, I shut myself in because I'm lonely. Because I don't want to face any more loneliness, I shut myself away.”
― Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.

“It occurred to me that the whole of art--maybe the whole of life--is just spray-painting your name on a wall, hoping that someone will see it after you've gone. And kids are to make sure that there's someone around who'll remember you when you're not around anymore.”
― Neil Gaiman, Death: The Time of Your Life

“Being a nun wasn't all it was cracked up to be and the sex was shit.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard

“The Oval Office carpet is thick with Presidential semen. They look out of the window, think "I own you all" and jack off like ugly apes in humping season. It's what they live for. No one who wants that is to be trusted. Why can't you all see that?”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian