Leland B. > Leland's Quotes

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die...”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Power has reached its full capacity in the form of the nation-state. It derives its strength mainly from the sexism it spreads and intensifies by the integration of women into the labour force as well as through nationalism and militarism. Sexism, just as nationalism, is an ideology through which power is generated and nation-states are built. Sexism is not a function of biological differences. To the dominant male, the female is an object to be used for the realisation of his ambitions. In the same vein, when the housewifisation of woman was done, he started the process of turning males into slaves; subsequently the two forms of slavery have become intertwined.”
― Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Woman's Revolution

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley, Do what you will: Twelve essays

“The individual who rebels against the arrangements of society is ostracized, branded, stoned. So be it. I am willing to take the risk; my principles are very pagan. I will live my own life as it pleases me. I am willing to do without your hypocritical respect; I prefer to be happy.
The inventors of the Christian marriage have done well, simultaneously to invent immortality. I, however, have no wish to live eternally. When with my last breath everything as far as Wanda von Dunajew is concerned comes to an end here below, what does it profit me whether my pure spirit joins the choirs of angels, or whether my dust goes into the formation of new beings?
Shall I belong to one man whom I don't love, merely because I have once loved him? No, I do not renounce; I love everyone who pleases me, and give happiness to everyone who loves me.
Is that ugly? No, it is more beautiful by far.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Whole columns are devoted to parliamentary debates and to political intrigues; while the vast everyday life of a nation appears only in the columns given to economic subjects, or in the pages devoted to reports of police and law cases. And when you read the newspapers, your hardly think of the incalculable number of beings—all humanity, so to say—who grow up and die, who know sorrow, who work and consume, think and create outside the few encumbering personages who have been so magnified that humanity is hidden by their shadows, enlarged by our ignorance.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
― Ivan Illich

“Family, in this social context, developed as man‘s small state. The family as an institution has been continuously perfected throughout the history of civilisation, solely because of the reinforcement it provides to power and state apparatus. Firstly, family is turned into a stem cell of state society by giving power to the family in the person of the male. Secondly, woman‘s unlimited and unpaid labour is secured. Thirdly, she raises children in order to meet population needs. Fourthly, as a role model she disseminates slavery and immorality to the whole society. Family, thus constituted, is the institution where dynastic ideology becomes functional.”
― Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Woman's Revolution

“Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals.”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky, Poesía

“The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. . . Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. . . Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.”
― Pema Chodron

“Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“Finally, the optimist’s impatience with or condemnation of pessimism often has a smug macho tone to it (although males have no monopoly of it). There is a scorn for the perceived weakness of the pessimist who should instead ‘grin and bear it’. This view is defective for the same reason that macho views about other kinds of suffering are defective. It is an indifference to or inappropriate denial of suffering, whether one’s own or that of others. The injunction to ‘look on the bright side’ should be greeted with a large dose of both scepticism and cynicism. To insist that the bright side is always the right side is to put ideology before the evidence. Every cloud, to change metaphors, may have a silver lining, but it may very often be the cloud rather than the lining on which one should focus if one is to avoid being drenched by self-deception. Cheery optimists have a much less realistic view of themselves than do those who are depressed.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns.”
― Tom Waits

“In general modern man has no solutions”
― Alexander Herzen

“You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.”
― William Godwin

“We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out-- when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“-" زوجتي تسأل إن كان جبننا يعطيك الحق في أن تكون هكذا، وهي، كما ترى، تعترف ببراءة بأننا كنا جبناء، ومن هنا فأنت على حق، ولكن ذلك لا يبرر لك شيئا، إن خطأ زائد خطأ لا يساويان صحا، ولو كان الأمر كذلك لكان ما حدث لايفرات ولميريام في أوشفيتز صوابا، ولكن متى تكفون عن اعتبار ضعف الآخرين وأخطائهم مجيرة لحساب ميزاتكم ؟ لقد اهترأت هذه الأقوال العتيقة، هذه المعادلات الحسابية المترعة بالأخاديع... مرة تقولون أن أخطاءنا تبرر أخطاءكم، ومرة تقولون أن الظلم لا يصحح بظلم آخر... تستخدمون المنطق الأول لتبرير وجودكم هنا، وتستخدمون المنطق الثاني لتتجنبوا العقاب الذي تستحقونه، ويخيل إلي أنكم تتمتعون الى أقصى حد بهذه اللعبه الطريفة، وها أنت تحاول مرة جديده أن تجعل من ضعفنا حصان الطراد الذي تعتلي صهوته... لا، أنا لا أتحدث إليك مفترضا إنك عربي، والآن أنا أكثر من يعرف أن الإنسان هو قضية، وليس لحما ودما يتوارثه جيل وراء جيل مثلما يتبادل البائع والزبون معلبات اللحم المقدد، إنما أتحدث إاليك مفترضا أنك في نهاية الأمر إنسان. يهودي. أو فلتكن ما تشاء. ولكن عليك أن تدرك الأشياء كما ينبغي... وأنا أعرف أنك ذات يوم ستدرك هذه الأشياء، وتدرك أن أكبر جريمة يمكن لأي إنسان أن يرتكبها، كائنا من كان، هي أن يعتقد ولو للحظة أن ضعف الآخرين وأخطاءهم هي التي تشكل حقه في الوجود على حسابهم، وهي التي تبرر له أخطاءه وجرائمه...

-" وأنت، أتعتقد أننا سنظل نخطئ ؟ وإن كففنا ذات يوم عن الخطأ، فما الذي يتبقى لديك ؟".”
― غسان كنفاني, عائد إلى حيفا

“The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.”
― Emma Goldman

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“الفتن التي تتخفى وراء قناع الدين تجارة رائجة جدًا في عصور التراجع الفكري للمجتمعات”
― ابن خلدون

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini

“Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.”
― J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

“Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934