Alena

“I think I am starting to vanish slowly from head to toe. There are ten different ways to say sunset. The bartender says my face is wearing all of them.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“If to exploit is human nature, than this, to resist exploitation, is also human nature. No exploiter has ever lived in peace without their weapons, their soldiers, and their propaganda and lies. And I have enough faith in human self-interest to believe that those who do the true labor of society will rise for their own sake until there are no more exploiters to combat, however many eons it will take. Every oppresser, through their denial of humanity, sows the seeds of their own destruction.”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Heavenly Tyrant

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This