Alexandra > Alexandra's Quotes

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
― Horace Mann

“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice.

If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.

If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.
The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering.

Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.”
― Julian Assange

“Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Activism is my rent for living on the planet.”
― Alice Walker

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
― Winston Churchill

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
― John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”
― Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Vol. 3: American Statesmen

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“Are we living a life that is safe from harm?

Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is are we living a life that is worth the harm?”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“Katczinsky is right when he says it would not be such a bad war if only one could get a little more sleep.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
― Socrates

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
― Marie Curie

“Lives are short, but knowledge is eternal.”
― Rachel Caine, Ink and Bone

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“In that moment, something hit me: It’s just us. I always thought that in this place there would be somebody better, but it’s just this group of people—including me—trying to figure stuff out. I didn’t mean that as an insult to any of the participants, who were talented people. But we were just people, ordinary people in extraordinary roles in challenging times. I’m not sure what I had expected, but I met the top of the pyramid and it was just us, which was both comforting and a bit frightening.”
― James B. Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.”
― Henry Kissinger

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“She understood the world and her place in it. She understood nothing. The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“Fear is a reasonable response to life.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.”
― John Jay, The Federalist Papers

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“It was a fair question, although the problem with fair questions is that they are asked about an unfair world.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“She left the shower as most people leave showers, clean and a little lonely.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“In terms of tacos, she was doing fine.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“The universe is unraveling. It still is. We won the day. We won the battle. We won whatever unit of measurement you care to say that we won. We returned to the dangerous equilibrium we had before, which we can only assume, or hope, or wish is better. But, of course, we did not stop the unraveling of the universe. The universe is not a thing that is, it is not a thing at all. It is the very action of its going. It is, in fact, its own dissolves and our lives – the entire span of human existence going back and back and, if we are lucky, forward and forward – the entire span is spent within this dissolve.

So look at the fleeting stars with fleeting eyes, and feel how the earth beneath you gives. It is all a temporary manifestation of particles, and it is all unraveling back to particulate silence. The bustle of the human day will come and will go. And then there will be night.

But how beautiful these moments within the dissolve! What a temporary perfection we can find within this passing world! Everything good ever done! Everything good that was done today, and all the good people doing it, and back and back and forward and forward, all of that beauty within a universe unraveling.

Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic! And stupid. And excellent”
― Joseph Fink

“To be remembered is, I think, a basic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in a desert when it is gone.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“We are skipping Friday this week, but we’ll make up for it by having Double Friday next week. Mark your schedules.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale