Mahsa > Recent Status Updates

A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished; and that the perfection of the machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

“Night crawled across the desert sky, like a black cat with phosphorus dandruff.”

Just putting off the inevitable, Idris knew. But that was life, wasn’t it?

I believe that we are born for reasons we do not understand – it is up to us to discover those reasons. That is your only task. If you’re brave enough to sit and listen to the voice of the universe in the silence that lives within you, then you will always know what matters – and you will know too that you matter more to the universe than you will ever know.

“Happiness. What the hell did that mean? It had to be more than the absence of sadness.”

“Where the water was visible, it was black like ink. Occasionally, a few bubbles would eructate to the surface like the ghosts of beans and bath night.”

It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off.
Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

My tongue is a hand groping in the depths of a black sack for some way of steering this conversation to my purpose in coming here.

“Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.”

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”

“Never mind what I said, or common sense or anything. Sometimes you just have to go the way things take you…”

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself [] temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing [] source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centers of improvement as there are individuals.

“No man, earns punishment, no man earns rewards. Free your minds of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.@

“Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.”

“That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of stinking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate-we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoising. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.”

“The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.”

“He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind.”

“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

“The individual cannot bargain with the State.The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”

“No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain – you said that! But it is the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It is the lies that make you want to kill yourself…”

you can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think - refusing to change.

So it was with him. His heart yearned towards them, the kindly young souls who called him brother, but he could not reach them, nor they him. He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.

“You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again.”

Even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high mindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics, in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.

The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truth is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on the balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.

It is this [social] stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which incur risk of judicial punishment.

…[social] opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

“Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.”

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each as seems good to the rest.