Petra

“The nature versus nurture debate has meaning for each of us here because we are constantly being asked in life: Why are you the way you are? When did you first know you were different? Do you think that while you were in the womb your tiny fist inadvertently clenched an essential gene too hard? Or was your mother domineering?

And my answer is: Who cares! As long as my right to explore the full measure of my own potential is being trampled by discriminatory laws, as long as I am being scapegoated for the crimes committed by this economic system, my right to exist needs no explanation or justification of any kind.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“I refuse to listen to the insidious arguments of the skiers, who are constantly trying to persuade me to abandon the kayaks. I trust my kayaks and will not give in. I have reminded my companions of my unswerving conviction on more than one occasion.”
― Valerian Albanov, In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic

“When, therefore, a man is told, “You (your inner being) are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted,” this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man's reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box on the ear — in the way mentioned above when dealing with psysiognomy — removes primarily the “soft” parts of his head from their apparent dignity and position, and proves merely that these are no true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here would, properly speaking, have to go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Vol 1

“When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited . . . but that on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and this very relation drives them beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their destruction. The finite not only alters, as anything does, but it ceases to be, and it is not merely a possibility that it ceases to be, as though it could be that it might not cease. No, the nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic