Zach

“We are still untangling the legal and moral problems caused by the invention of a new sex, the transsexual, produced by chemical and surgical manipulation of the body. The transsexual is a technological androgyne whom we are happy to call “she” out of the courtesy owed to all inspired makers of fiction.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“It is hard to go into a fight and were often afraid," confessed the Cheyenne warrior John Stands in Timber, "but it was worse to turn back and face the women.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want a life in which they can make their own choices. But what if they can be fulfilled only by a life in which they follow each other? The majority who obey the fashion of the day may be acting on a secret awareness that they lack the potential for a truly individual existence. Liberalism – the ichthyophil variety, at any rate – teaches that everyone yearns to be free. Herzen’s experience of the abortive European revolutions of 1848 led him to doubt that this was so. It was because of his disillusionment that he criticized Mill so sharply. But if it is true that Mill was deluded in thinking that everyone loves freedom, it may also be true that without this illusion there would be still less freedom in the world. The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly Allowing the majority of humankind to imagine they are flying fish even as they pass their lives under the waves, liberal civilization rests on a dream”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“For humans the most danger power-- and the power most able to confer heart-swelling beneficence -- has always been other human beings acting together in a social institution.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character