Lori Davidson

“The truth has power to end every tyranny.....They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do. You don't have to be a grizzled Cod Warrior to see that a notion of progress that depends on labor camps, police informers, and making everybody equally poor to achieve justice and equality is phony.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“We are always concocting theories about how the world works and why people act in the ways they do. We invent motives for them, as if it's possible for us to know, but more often than not these explanations are like flimsy cardboard state sets we put up in front of reality because they are simpler and less distracting than what's actually there. I think I became a documentary filmmaker to try to get a truer view. It's not that film can't lie or distort or be used for dastardly purposes, it's that sometimes the camera extracts from the faces and bodies of its subjects what they do not say aloud. I was sixteen when I first saw Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, and after that, I couldn't stop thinking about he expressiveness of people's hands when they are controlling their faces.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

“...a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit. We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That's just the case. But you shouldn't accommodate to it," she tells me as I sit her table in suburban Budapest. "You will be surrounded by lies--you don't have a choice. Don't assimilate to it. It's an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation...Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist. It is a gift from God that invites us to change. To start a revolution against the oppression. But for me, the oppressor was no longer the totalitarian communist regime. It's not even the progressive liberal state. Meeting these hidden heroes started a revolution against the greatest totalitarian ruler of all: myself." We ourselves are the ultimate rulers of our consciences. Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort...”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents