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kiomi
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And so was seeded a lifetime of contradiction: Stay out of the midday sun. Avoid bright colors. Cover up. Lower your voice. At the same time: Be yourself. Be proud. Be the best. Be. Succeed while hiding in plain sight. Be better in order to
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“I suppose the idea behind the “Some of my best friends are black” defense is that you cannot be prejudiced if you choose to interact with different racial backgrounds. It suggests that any association with black people is a form of activism when it in fact is the bare minimum of living in a society that includes black people.”
― Black Friend: Essays
― Black Friend: Essays
“For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“I know: you no longer believe in anything,” said Manette disapprovingly. “That’s not quite true.” “What do you believe in?” “People’s suffering, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance.”
― The Woman Destroyed
― The Woman Destroyed
“Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“a nationalist is not a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
kiomi’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at kiomi’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
89 books
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3 friends
833 books
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4,826 friends
12,724 books
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201 friends
193 books
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10 friends
364 books
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62 friends
57 books
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21 friends
49 books
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244 friends
754 books
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434 friends
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