Aileen > Aileen's Quotes

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#1

“We all live our lives carrying secrets we cannot disclose.”
― Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

32 likes

#2

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”
― Chuck Palahniuk

tags: consumerism

104 likes

#3

“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.”
― Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life

tags: consumer, consumerism, money

76 likes

#4

“The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference. (Clodovis Boff, p. 161)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

tags: consumerism, first-world, third-world

11 likes

#5

“Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and more commodities—are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for the deepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination.”
― Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

tags: advertising, capitalism, consumerism, consumption, entertainment, marketing

15 likes

#6

“World gone money mad. The pinch of war gone, people must spend. Buy and forget. Spend and solace. Silks for sorrows. Jewels to bring back joy.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine

tags: capitalism, consumer-products, consumerism, joy, money, solace, spending, war

1 likes

#7

“To argue a moral position convincingly these days requires that one speak to (and not depart from) people's love of material well-being, their fascination with efficiency, or their fear of death.”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

tags: consumerism, efficiency, fear-of-death, morality, narrow-mindedness, self-serving, technology

3 likes

#8

“The typical person saw over 5,000 advertisements yesterday telling them to buy something new.

Here's 1 with the opposite message: Buy Less.”
― Joshua Becker

tags: advertising, consumerism, minimalism, society

1 likes

#9

“The people I know who are rebelling meaningfully, you know, don't buy a lot of stuff and don't get their view of the world from television and are willing to spend four, five hours researching an election rather than commercials. The thing about it is that in America, we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing and that it involves action and force and looks good. My guess is that any form of rebellion that will change things meaningfully here will be very quiet and very individual and probably not all that interesting to look at from the outside...Violence is interesting. Horrible corruption and scandals and rattling sabers and talking about war and demonizing a billion people of a different faith in the world—those are all interesting. Sitting in a chair and really thinking about what this all means and why the fact that what I drive might have something to do with how people in other parts of the world think about me isn't interesting to anybody else.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview Expanded with New Introduction: and Other Conversations

tags: america, consumerism, meaning, oil, thinking

11 likes

#10

“We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too.”
― Phillip Cary, Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do

tags: cherishing, consumerism, spirituality

29 likes

#11

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas

tags: evil, violence

868 likes

#12

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”
― Joseph Conrad

tags: chronic-illness, cure, cures, healing, illness, inspirational, recovery

279 likes

#13

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

tags: ignorance, intelligence, opinions, stupidity

3090 likes

#14

“There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.”
― C. JoyBell C.

tags: difference, differences, droids, fitting-in, generic, generic-people, ignorance, life, life-and-living, living, living-inside-a-box, monotonous, people, societies, society, weird, weirdness

1083 likes

#15

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works

tags: bigotry, ignorance, life, prejudice

1114 likes

#16

“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
― Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

tags: conformism, disregard, ignorance, innovation, persecution, reformers, trailblazers

569 likes

#17

“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
― Kofi Annan

tags: ignorance, intolerance, prejudice, racism, tolerance

404 likes

#18

“To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

tags: acquiescence, activism, free-speech, justice, principles, protest

605 likes

#19

“Every person is a thinker. It depends on one, how one thinks, and writes and approaches the heart and mind of others.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

tags: thinker

1 likes

#20

“Ten ways to die for a fool; a thousand ways to live for a thinker.”
― VKBoy

tags: death, fool, intellect, life, thinker

2 likes

#21

“I agree that I know nothing. And you know nothing. So, I say, let's figure out together - two equally conditioned pedestrians of freedom with equal potential for truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar

tags: inspirational, knowledge, life-lessons, philosophy, religion, spirituality, thinker, truth, wisdom

2 likes

#22

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.”
― Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas

tags: freedom-of-thought, independence-of-thought, thinking, tolerance, voltaire

717 likes

#23

“It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.

Ignorance is our deepest secret.

And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.

Here is a quick test:

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.

It will do both of you good.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

tags: adapt, adaptability, assimilate, assimilation, beliefs, change, discovery, ignorance, ignorant, incorporating, introspection, learning, mutability, new, new-thought, open, open-mind, open-minded, open-mindedness, ponder, question, questioning, questions, re-evaluating, receptive, rethink, rethinking, secret, think, thinking, wise

373 likes

#24

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

tags: contemplation, life, spiritual, thinking

331 likes

#25

“To seek truth requires one to ask the right questions. Those void of truth never ask about anything because their ego and arrogance prevent them from doing so. Therefore, they will always remain ignorant. Those on the right path to Truth are extremely heart-driven and childlike in their quest, always asking questions, always wanting to understand and know everything — and are not afraid to admit they don't know something. However, every truth seeker does need to breakdown their ego first to see Truth. If the mind is in the way, the heart won't see anything.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

tags: arrogance, arrogant, ask-questions, asking-questions, asking-questions-quotes, brain, child, childlike, ego, egoism, egotism, fake, god, heart, ignorance, lies, media, mind, news, path, quest, question, questions-and-answers, reason, religion, road-to-truth, seeking, true, truth, truth-seeker, understand, understanding, untrue

45 likes

#26

“We need to eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, religion, and nationality. Every human requires food and water to survive and every human has a heart that bleeds, loves, and grieves.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

tags: bleed, blood, child, class, divide, division, education, equality, ethnicity, grief, grieve, grieves, heart, human, income, love, loves, man, nation, nationality, race, religion, skills, suzy-kassem, unite, united, woman

23 likes

#27

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: dissent, freedom-of-thought, independent-thought, skepticism

1631 likes

#28

“A martyr is someone willing to die for what he believes in. A fanatic is someone willing for you to die for what he believes in.”
― Marsha Hinds

tags: belief, dying, fanatic, fanaticism, killing-people, martyr, martyrdom, murder

6 likes

#29

“Fanatics are those who, when following a doctrine becomes inconvenient, make up rules of their own.”
― Cathryn Louis

tags: doctrine, fanatic, rules

2 likes

#30

“Some people are willing to be killed for beliefs for which the people from whom they got them are not even willing to be slapped.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: atheism, die-for, fanatic, fanaticism, indoctrination, kill-for, religion, suicide-bomber, suicide-bombers, suicide-bombing

3 likes

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