Matthew Edward

“All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations - at our expense? Their "naturally superior talents" include unprincipled and illegal subterfuge such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider training, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforcement of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful products and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the corporate business system.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“There was a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, “of the Others.” They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. they called her half and half, mita’ y mita‘, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift.

There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the heiros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“The final proof that this alien indoctrination which begins in nursery
school is based on the splitting of the family is that those working class
children who arrive (those few who do arrive) at university are so brainwashed
that they are unable any longer to talk to their community.
Working class children then are the first who instinctively rebel against
schools and the education provided in schools. But their parents carry
them to schools and confine them to schools because they are concerned
that their children should “have an education”, that is, be equipped to
escape the assembly line or the kitchen to which they, the parents, are
confined. If a working class child shows particular aptitudes, the whole
family immediately concentrates on this child, gives him the best conditions,
often sacrificing the others, hoping and gambling that he will carry
them all out of the working class. This in effect becomes the way capital
moves through the aspirations of the parents to enlist their help in disciplining
fresh labor power.”
― Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community

“that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy