Alaa > Recent Status Updates

"Everything seems to be speeding up, rushing toward one destination."

But when we follow the suggestions of genetic and social instructions without question we relinquish the control of consciousness and become helpless playthings of impersonal forces. 2/2

The problem is that it has recently become fashionable to regard whatever we feel inside as the true voice of nature speaking. The only authority many people trust today is instinct. If something feels good, if it is natural and spontaneous, then it must be right. 1/2

The amount of cursing is ridiculous, x.x reminds me of locke lamora...I understand the need to convey the environment and the characters etc... But god this is getting annoying.

'So often people think that when we arrive at a crossroads, we can choose only one path, but as I have often and articulately postulated, people are stupid. We are not walking the path we are the path. We all of the roads and all of the intersections. Of course, you can choose both.'

I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn’t dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn’t dream of becoming a giant—I wasn’t that delusional or arrogant—but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget.
I could have been a midget.
All our dreams of glory are but manure in the end.

objection to a particular status quo, no matter how strongly expressed, is rarely enough to make a difference. Why? All too often, in the face of an unjust equilibrium, we fall prey to the instinct to reject the current state entirely. But a visceral rejection of an all-powerful system tilts completely to abhorrence, making it difficult to engage with the system deeply enough to see the levers for change.

For the social entrepreneur, an intensive understanding of a particular status quo propels all that follows. In order to intervene in an existing equilibrium, one must first recognize it for what it is

It's one of the rare occasions that I could easily give 5 starts rating before finishing the book.

"The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform."

o.o each character has three names.... nickname, full name, and idk what name? why? is this is Russian thing?

o.o each one character has three names.... nickname, full name, and idk what name? why?

the amount of repetitiveness is hovering like a mist dimming everything x.x

I'm afraid I'll die by the amount of sexism in this book.

We should not be encumbered by what we cannot control and change as suits the times. A promise given in the past was a necessity of the past.
A broken vow is necessity of the present. There is no such thing as "honour", or "I give him my word." Words, as you know are meaningless, and only fools trust in them.

It's quite possible to make up your mind about a book from the very first page.

I'm very disappointed of Goodreads choice awards nominees.

“[c] hildren who have not been taught their rights, in a rights-respecting environment, tend to personalize the concept of rights and have difficulty appreciating the rights of others.  .  . . [C]hildren who have not received children’s rights education tend to believe that having rights means being able to do what you want.”

"They develop the attitudes and values that are necessary for the promotion and protection of the rights of others, and they acquire the behavioral skills necessary for effective participation in a democratic society."

"The evidence shows overwhelmingly that children who learn about and experience their rights are children who demonstrate the fundamentals of good citizenship. They gain knowledge not only of their basic rights but also their corresponding social responsibilities. "

Probably the most precious read. The words are so 'quite' it reaches my heart so fast. It's as if in writing with silence you move the forces of time.

To their minds, it seemed, their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes. But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong

It was not uncommon for a man or a woman who regularly went forth to kill to keep a few favorite Tutsis hidden in his or her home. Later, such people sometimes pleaded that they took some lives in order not to attract attention to their efforts to save others.

“they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining

Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power

In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power.

"So the people of influence, or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn’t kill because they didn’t take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And, in Rwanda, an order can be given very quietly" 2/2

“In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn’t enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. 1/2

Tumblr posts style, honestly. ..... How do they get published o.O?

#Hiroshima I never really thought of the "individuals" who were involved, I always saw it as a whole, the tragedy of a nation. But it was person, one, two, three, major players.