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“Women don't understand self-defense the way men do—perhaps because sexual abuse destroys the self. We don't feel we have a right to kill just because we are being beaten, raped, tortured, and terrorized. We are hurt for a long time before we fight back.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”
― Thurgood Marshall

“As Raimbaud dragged a dead man along he thought, 'Oh corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It's that I think of, oh corpse, it's that you make me think of: but does anything change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours before the tomb, both for us the waste them, not to waste anything of what I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause: to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path, fulfilling the duties of his station in life, attending to his morning and evening prayers, approaching the holy sacrament frequently and performing good and merciful works. For the pious and believing catholic, for the just man, death is no cause of terror. Was it not Addison, the great English writer, who, when on his deathbed, sent for the wicked young earl of Warwick to let him see how a christian can meet his end? He it is and he alone, the pious and believing christian, who can say in his heart:
O grave, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Oxford World's Classics) by James Joyce (12-Jun-2008) Paperback