Banned Quotes

As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst thing that’s happened since I found out why Magnus was banned from Peru.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.

Do you want to go back to Vienna?” he said. Alec didn’t answer, just stared into space. “Or we could go somewhere else,” said Magnus. “Anywhere you want. Thailand, South Carolina, Brazil, Peru – Oh, wait, no, I’m banned from Peru. I’d forgotten about that. It’s a long story, but amusing if you want to hear it.

Yeah,there was a whole chapter on you in my eight grade History of Angels textbook," Miles said. Arriane clapped. "And they told me that book was banned!

If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

No kissing?" "Well, kissing, probably. But as for the rest of it..." She brushed her cheek lightly against his. "It's okay with me if it's okay with you." "Of course it's not okay with me. I'm a teenage boy. As far as I'm concerned, this is the worst thing that's happened since I found out why Magnus was banned from Peru.

Of course it's not okay with me, I'm a teenage boy. As far as I'm concerned, this is the worst thing that's happenedd since I found out why Magnus was banned from Peru" - Jace

Jace was probably the safest boyfriend in the world since he was pretty much banned from (1) getting angry, (2) making sexual advances, and (3) doing anything that would produce an adrenaline rush.

We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.

A word to the unwise. Torch every book. Char every page. Burn every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.

If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?

Dear God in heaven.” Nik and Ban turned away, but Alek stood. Transfixed. “My God, y’all. She’s the worst goddamn dancer I’ve ever seen.” “Turn away. It’ll hurt your eyes. Turn away!

You called me at four thirty-four....I hate four thirty-four. I think four thirty-four should be banned and replaced with something more reasonable, like, say, nine twelve.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

It’s a responsibility that I take most seriously, so excuse me for banning you from killing them because you have reverse PMS. (Acheron) Reverse PMS? (Artemis) Yeah, unlike a normal woman, you’re cranky twenty-eight days out of the month. (Acheron)

Nafs. Nafs Insaan Ko Janwar Bana Deti Hai. Jab Insaan Nafs Ka Ghulam Ho Jata Ha tou Janwar Ban Jata Hai!

Even some of our cookbooks are banned. (Though it's been centuries, at least, since the Pitches ate fairies.) (You can't even find fairies anymore.) (And it isn't because we ate them all.)

No,you're officially banned from listening to us. Or thinking about this. Or even thinking about thinking about this, understand?

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

Tell me that you didn’t break the ban, Rory. Tell me that there aren’t two Bradfords beating the shit out of each other over the last slice of cheese in my kitchen.

Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

Grace is my favourite church word. A state of being. Something you can pray for. Something God can grant. Something you can obtain. Perfection is out of reach. But grace -- grace you can reach for.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".

[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. [Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]

Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?

Merit: “I am yours until you ban bacon, or otherwise as long as I can put up with you.

I've got this." Apollo stepped forward. His fiery armor was so bright it was hard to look at, and his matching Ray-Bans and perfect smile made him look like a male model for battle gear. "God of medicine, at your service." He passed his hand over Annabeth's face and spoke an incantation. Immediately the bruises faded. Her cuts and scars disappeared. Her arm straightened, and she sighed in her sleep. Apollo grinned. "She'll be fine in a few minutes. Just enough time for me to compose a poem about our victory: 'Apollo and his friends save Olympus.' Good, eh?" Thanks, Apollo," I said. "I'll, um, let you handle the poetry.

Since we live in a world of appearances, people are judged by what they seem to be. If the mind can't read the predictable features, it reacts with alarm or aversion. Faces which don’t fit in the picture are socially banned. An ugly countenance, a hideous outlook can be considered as a crime and criminals must be inexorably discarded from society. ( "Ugly mug offense" )

If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them." [Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992]

Faith is the very first thing you should pack in a hope chest.

Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Maggie threw her head back and laughed. 'So you're going to try...what? Birds of a Feather?' she quested. 'Of course not,' Kat said. 'Everyone knows the French government banned the importation of peacocks in 1987.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas.

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers But above all The world needs dreamers who do.

Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world," said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. "Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that really bad. She never bans hope.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

I head down the steps to see if my mail-order copy of Catcher in the Rye is in the box. I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.

What exactly are you so happy about?' Harry asked her. 'Oh Harry, don't you see?' Hermione breathed. 'If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!

Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain.

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether he admits it or not -- can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

When did I turn into a needywhiny angsty idiot who needed to be swept off her feet? She snorted then started running again, forcing me into a brief sprint to catch up. We're conditioned from birth she said. I swear to god,if I ever have a daughter I'll ban all of the Disney princesses from the house. Except Mulan. She kicks ass.

Success in life is not how well we execute Plan A; it's how smoothly we cope with Plan B.

Never forget that the most essential fashion accessories, the ones no woman can afford to do without, come from within. A generous heart, a spontaneous smile, and eyes that sparkle with delight can be part of any woman's signature look once she awakens to her authentic beauty.

In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children...The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.

You can't wish for more wishes or for vague generalities like happiness that are impossible to grant. Your wish has to be something specific enough that I can use my wand to make it happen. Oh, and recently there's been a ban on inserting yourself into the Twilight series. The Cullens are tired of different teenage girls pinging into their story every time they turn around.

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.

Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always about control; About who is snapping the whip, who is saying no, and who is saying go. Censorship's bottom line is this: if the novel Christine offends me, I don't want just to make sure it's kept from my kid; I want to make sure it's kept from your kid, as well, and all the kids. This bit of intellectual arrogance, undemocratic and as old as time, is best expressed this way: "If it's bad for me and my family, it's bad for everyone's family." Yet when books are run out of school classrooms and even out of school libraries as a result of this idea, I'm never much disturbed not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher . . . which I used to be. What I tell kids is, Don't get mad, get even. Don't spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.

It wasn’t until someone kicked his legs that Nik woke up. Alek, snoring beside him, his head resting on his shoulder. Ban snoring on the other couch, the noise rivaled only by the dog. He looked into the impossibly cranky face of Zach Sheridan. “Y’all get food?” “We had a full refrigerator before you three got here.” “Where I come from, we don’t let the refrigerator get empty.” “Where you come from, you marry your sister.

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.

Always remember, it’s simply not an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons.

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots.

She steeled herself for a serious shock of cold- but the reality was a thousand times more miserable. “Aw, those little shrieking sounds you’re making are super adorable,” Keefe told her. “Ready to punch me yet?” “S-splashing y-you s-sounds b-better,” she said through chattering teeth. “I suppose. But we both know I’ll splash you back- and then you’ll retaliate, because you may look all sweet and innocent, but you have a feisty streak. And then it’ll be an ice-water war, and Elwin will ban me from the Healing Center and you’ll be lost without my visits, and Id rather not make you suffer like that.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have. I merely give robust expression to views about the cosmos and morality with which you happen to disagree. You interpret that as ‘intolerance’ because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, which expects to get a free ride and not have to defend itself. If I wrote a book called The Socialist Delusion or The Monetarist Delusion, you would never use a word like intolerance. But The God Delusion sounds automatically intolerant. Why? What’s the difference? I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’. There is a huge difference.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive. And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

It's amazing how good governments are, given their track records in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters. One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it. It's not known why most of the space-going races of the universe want to undertake rummaging in Earthling underwear as a prelude to formal contact. But representatives of several hundred races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be abductees. Some have been in fact abducted while waiting to carry out an abduction on a couple of aliens trying to abduct the aliens who were, as a result of misunderstood instructions, trying to form cattle into circles and mutilate crops. The planet Earth is now banned to all alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they have actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one - who is big, hairy, and has very large feet. The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

The Source is all-loving and everything is part of the Source, even the villains, so there’s no possible way a play could end without love prevailing, since everything and everyone is comprised of love. When the methodical illusion has been stripped away, this becomes clear.

He cleared his throat. “You know this means that what we did what we almost did in Paris...” “Going to the Eiffel Tower?” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “You never let me off the hook for a single minute, do you? Never mind. It’s one of the things I love about you. Anyway, that other thing we almost did in Paris, that’s probably off the table for a while. Unless you want that whole baby-I’m-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal.” “No kissing?” “Well, kissing, probably. But as for the rest of it…” She brushed her cheek lightly against his. “It’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.” “Of course it’s not okay with me. I’m a teenage boy. As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst thing that’s happened since I found out why Magnus was banned from Peru.

People aren’t aware that their thoughts and emotions emanate from their bodies. When a person is frazzled, or not centered in some way, they’re not aware that they’re not only polluting their own body, mind, and spirit, but also the people around them.

To those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender -- let me say -- you are not alone. Your struggle, for the end to violence and discrimination, is a shared struggle. Today, I stand with you. And I call upon all countries and people, to stand with you too. A historic shift is underway. We must tackle the violence, decriminalize consensual same sex relationships and end discrimination. We must educate the public. I call on this council and people of conscience to make this happen. The time has come.

We should be finding out who’s making these meaningless labels that the common man argues over. Could it be the powerful individuals who are creating them in order to confuse the common man and keep them focused on arguing with each other so they won’t interfere with the powerful individuals’ agendas?

Despite his ability to think outside the box and be a freethinker, he’d fallen into the trap of social conditioning. He didn’t get down on himself once he realized this because he knew that it wasn’t easy to hold divergent thoughts and ideas when being immersed in a society that constantly pushed its point of view in every facet of life.

‎Không phải vô tình mà chiếc đồng hồ mang hình tròn. Mỗi ngày trôi qua, cứ tưởng là đang tiến về phía trước nhưng trên thực tế, đã quay lại vị trí ban đầu. Cuộc sống tù đọng. Chỉ trẻ con mới nghĩ là lớn lên sẽ tự do đến nơi mình muốn, làm điều mình thích. Chín mươi chín phần trăm chúng ta lần lượt lập gia đình, sinh con, đi làm, khai thuế, nhích dần từng bậc lương, đánh vật với các phương tiện giao thông, uống cà phê như uống nước để chống chọi các cơn buồn ngủ. Mọi dự định đều để giành đến hai ngày cuối tuần nhưng thứ bảy buổi sáng chen lấn trong siêu thị, buổi chiều hút bụi lau cửa kính giặt quần áo rửa xe ô tô, chủ nhật ăn cơm trưa xong đã bốn giờ chiều, hai ly rượu vang lại khiến phải ra đi-văng làm một giấc, tám giờ tối thức dậy ăn nốt chỗ cơm thừa ban trưa, thế là vừa vặn đúng bốn mươi tám tiếng đã tưởng chệch ra được vòng tròn của thời gian.

Jerome watched movies and was an avid reader. He was an intellectual, a smart guy, but he didn’t have the funds to get into college in order to collect that piece of paper that would allow him to get a decent job. He found it absurdly comical that even without years of education at a university, he could do a better job in a “proper career” than most who had degrees. He figured it was the elites’ way of keeping the caste system in play.

Power-hungry, amoral individuals who didn’t care about other people who had risen to the top of the ladder, or whose family tree had been in power for ages, could utilize a digital system to dominate and control the world. When this happens, forget about a person having a hard time getting a job with a minor criminal infraction permanently stamped on their record, which is bad enough, but instead, every facet of people’s lives would be completely controlled. If a globalist, or whoever had access to the controls, didn’t like what a person had done or even thought, a single push of a button could freeze their digital bank account, make them unemployable, or even label them an enemy of the State, effectively deleting them like a file off of a computer. It would be an Orwellian world where humanity was completely controlled and had no rights or freedoms. You’d have to march in lockstep or be deleted.

All of them had been give a makeover. Leo was wearing pinstriped pants, black leather shoes, a white collarless shirt with suspenders, and his tool belt, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a porkpie hat. “God, Leo.” Piper tried not to laugh. “I think my dad wore that to his last premiere, minus the tool belt.” “Hey, shut up!” “I think he looks good,” said Coach Hedge. “’Course, I look better.” The satyr was a pastel nightmare. Aphrodite had given him a baggy canary yellow zoot suit with two-tone shoes that fit over his hooves. He had a matching yellow broad-brimmed hat, a rose-colored shirt, a baby blue tie, and a blue carnation in his lapel, which Hedge sniffed and then ate. “Well,” Jason said, “at least your mom overlooked me.” Piper knew that wasn’t exactly true. Looking at him, her heart did a little tap dance. Jason was dressed simply in jeans and a clean purple T-shirt, like he’d worn at the Grand Canyon. He had new track shoes on, and his hair was newly trimmed. His eyes were the same color as the sky. Aphrodite’s message was clear: This one needs no improvement. And Piper agreed.

All the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose and demonize whoever the previous culture had worshipped. The Jews attacked Belial, the god of the Babylonians. The Christians banished Pan and Loki anda Mars, the respective deities of the ancient Greeks and Celts and Romans. The Anglican British banned belief in the Australian aboriginal spirits known as the Mimi. Satan is depicted with cloven hooves because Pan had them, and he carries a pitchfork based on the trident carried by Neptune. As each deity was deposed, it was relegated to Hell. For gods so long accustomed to receiving tribute and loving attention, of course this status shift put them into a foul mood.

If an invention couldn’t be used to collect money from the population, or even worse, if it nullified existing money-making businesses, it was bought and put on a basement shelf to rust. Jeremy could recall how long it took the electric car to make it to the public. He recalled reading how U.S. car and oil companies purchased transit systems in American cities between the 30s and 60s so they could scrap them and put diesel buses in their places. New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia were lucky their transit systems didn’t get purchased and abandoned before being completed. The horrible traffic in Los Angeles in particular prompted him to think about how the planned subway system in L.A. was purchased and halted so that money could keep filling up the coffers of certain powerful individuals. Not to mention how L.A.’s efficient streetcars were bought and yanked out of circulation in the 60s.

We’ll continue to dump huge, fresh batches of slimy shills on them, and watch the trolls and useful idiots get a whiff of the magic and also spew their texted goo onto the scene. Our countless troll farms will attack them everywhere online, I mean everywhere. We’ll also have our companies mess with them every step they take online and shadow-ban them. Being that we control virtually every company—Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, et cetera—we know everything they’re doing, even their messages and e-mails they think are private. Wherever they try to get important information out in an attempt to awaken the sleeping masses, we’ll shadow-ban it or outright ban it. We’ve found that the former works better.

But I suppose if you're friends of Magnus's ..." He went completely still. His runes faded. Then he leaped out of my hand and flew towards Annabeth, his blade twitching as if he was stiffing the air. "Where is she? Where are you hiding the babe?" Annabeth backed towards the rail. "Whoa, there, sword. Personal space?" "Jack, behave," Alex said. "What are you doing?" "She's around here somewhere," Jack insisted. He flew to Percy. "Aha! What's in your pocket, sea boy?" "Excuse me?" Percy looked a bit nervous about the magical sword hovering at his waistline. Alex lowered his Ray-Bans. "Okay, now I'm curious. What do you have in your pocket, Percy? Enquiring swords want to know." Percy pulled a plain-looking ballpoint pen from his jeans. "You mean this?" "BAM!" Jack said. "Who is this vision of loveliness?" "Jack," I said. "It's a pen." "No, it's not! Show me! Show me!" "Uh ... sure." Percy uncapped the pen. Immediately it transformed into a three-foot-long sword with a leaf-shaped blade of glowing bronze.. Compared to Jack, the weapon looked delicate, almost petite, but from the way Percy wielded it I had no doubt he'd be able to hold his own on the battlefields of Valhalla with that thing. Jack turned his point towards me, his runes flashing burgundy. "See Magnus? I told you it wasn't stupid to carry a sword disguised as a pen!" "Jack, I never said that!" I protested. "You did.

I myself grew up to be not only a Hero, but also a Writer. When I was an adult, I rewrote A Hero's Guide to Deadly Dragons, and I included not only some descriptions of the various deadly dragon species, and a useful Dragonese Dictionary, but also this story of how the book came to be written in the first place. This is the book that you are holding in your hands right now. Perhaps you even borrowed it from a Library? If so, thank Thor that the sinister figure of the Hairy Scary Librarian is not lurking around a corner, hiding in the shadows, Heart-Slicers at the ready, or that the punishment for your curiosity is not the whirring whine of a Driller Dragon's drill. You, dear reader, I am sure cannot imagine what it might to be like to live in a world in which books are banned. For surely such things will never happen in the Future? Thank Thor that you live in a time and a place where people have the right to live and think and write and read their books in peace, and there are no need for Heroes anymore ... And spare a thought for those who have not been so lucky.

Our love affair with guns has nothing to do with tyranny, or militias, or self-preservation. Just ask any NRA member the following: If Jesus Christ himself were to come down off the cross and grant you one wish, would you opt for a world without guns -- or the one we live in now? If every gun owner truly feared for their life and liberty, the answer would be obvious. But it's not about life and liberty. It's all about the sheer hard-on of owning a gun.

Since we’re all One, even a single person’s thoughts and emotions can have an impact on the global consciousness, the soup we all reside in. Every single person has the power to affect the world with their thoughts and emotions alone, and when there are enough people holding beneficial temperaments, the world will transform in the blink of an eye. What one does can be important, but the conscious state one holds is infinitely more important.

When impersonal digital records on electronics are used to forever brand people, the world loses its humanity, its human nature. It’s no longer humans who decide the fate of other humans, but inhuman technology that decides as the world moves closer to a technological tyranny that rules over and controls humans, whether they’ve been labeled bad or good. Jerome had observed how the world was becoming more and more impersonal, more inhumane as people gave up their rights to think for themselves, allowing unelected technocrats to shape the world as they saw fit, and be in control of disseminating information that shaped and molded the population’s mind.

These powerful people used their huge companies as facades to hide their actions and Trojan horses to deceptively implement their nefarious agendas. When an enormous company did something that could’ve been construed by the public as sinister, a company could always chalk up the reason for any of their actions to a means to make a financial gain instead of its actual villainous purpose. They’d pay a fine that seemed large to the common man but was a drop in the bucket for their huge companies. Jeremy wouldn’t have been surprised if he learned that the companies were even being given back the fined money in some way behind closed doors.

He wondered how many irate L.A. drivers stuck in hellish traffic for hours on a daily basis would react if they had all the facts in their hands about their scrapped subway system. It alone would fuel horrendous rage when they realized that literally years of their lives had been, and will continue to be, unnecessarily spent in bumper to bumper traffic before retirement. Once given the facts, he was sure a good amount of L.A. drivers would completely snap, make their way to the homes of the powerful individuals responsible, march through their grand marble foyers, barge through countless mahogany doors, and fill those greedy cocksuckers full of American-hero bullets.

Looking back on the years and what he experienced in life, despite his acquired “success,” it was obvious that society’s path to happiness couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, it was running headlong in the completely opposite direction of where contentment could be found. He made a mental note to keep this lesson in mind in order to avoid getting swept up in the raging energy and distractions that society created, and one day society would be made aware of its error and transform itself, either by choice, or forced to by the natural cyclical laws of the universe.

After wondering for a while why he had allowed himself to depart from a life of liberation, the reason formed in his mind during one of his contemplations: when one is living in a society that holds entirely different views about what is important in life and how one should think and interact within life, it can be easy to lose one’s newfound enlightenment and return to the faulty mindset held by the society the person is immersed in. It can happen slowly or quickly. He had forgotten what was important and allowed himself to get swept up into what society deemed was important and made one happy.

If there was one thing that Jeremy learned from dealing with powerful companies, it was that the world revolved around money and power and intelligence would always take a backseat to greed, which bred a society of fools. No wonder most companies weren’t implementing smart business models and revolutionary devices weren’t being invented or making their way into the public anymore. The leaps forward his civilization had seen in the past decades seemed to be more like backward steps once a magnifying glass and scrutiny were applied. Almost every modern revolutionary idea, system, or invention seemed to be acquired by powerful people and used to fuel their greed and ability to stay in power rather than advance humanity.

No wonder the foreseen future depicted in sci-fi movies and literature where people were commuting in automatic flying vehicles and possessed a wealth of devices that would dispense with common day chores never became realized in our present world. Those advances had been and are still being halted in the name of money and power. Here we were still relying on dirty fossil fuels for energy more than a century after vehicles were invented, and archaic batteries for giving power to devices, which were just two examples Jeremy could think of off the top of his head. Greed and power kept humanity from advancing.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

My friends and I call the slammer the prison business because that’s what they’ve made it, a business, a company that works for profit. The establishment may repeat its lie to citizens that prisons have to spend such-and-such amount of money to keep each prisoner incarcerated, but in actuality, the taxpayer pays that whole bill. The prisons then make a profit for each inmate on their sheet. That’s why America has a staggeringly high amount of people in prison compared to any other country in the world. It’s a business, and they’re always looking for more employees. And once you work for them once, your criminal record makes you unemployable so that crime is the only way you can survive, making it highly probable that you’ll soon end up in the slammer as one of their employees again. It’s a vicious cycle that they cooked up on purpose; it wasn’t just a flaw that happened to arise in the system.

Dale was a stockbroker at Stryker & Marshall, one of the biggest brokerage firms in America. He always wore a suit when he went out in public, even when he wasn’t working, because there was always that odd chance he might cross paths with a client, or a possible future client. But regardless of clients, it assisted in reinforcing his pompous mentality that he was superior to others. He flaunted his suits and wore them like they were a piece of himself, an outer shell that created a buffer zone between his vainglorious identity and the peasants that made up most of the population. So naturally he flinched when he heard Jeremy threatening the cleanliness of his suit, his image.

If a person who believes in the label ‘Global Warming’ hears someone else say that they don’t believe in Global Warming, they automatically think the person is for polluting the planet. What a childish mindset. It’s only powerful individuals who are for polluting the planet because they can save a lot of money when dumping their waste in nature instead of disposing of it properly, or by using dirty fossil fuels for energy instead of cleaner options. All those powerful individuals sternly agree that Global Warming is a problem when addressing the public, but behind closed doors, they count the money they’ve collected from imposing Global Warming taxes on their competitors and continue to pollute themselves. The biggest companies in the world that are pushing this agenda continue to pollute the planet and aren’t paying any taxes themselves. They’re using Global Warming as a front.

COVID-19 … another bioengineered virus we’ve added to our past accomplishments: H5N1, SIV, HIV, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, SARS, Zika—the list is so long. We have so many biolabs situated around the world.” The other man replied, “The original virus’ strain was specifically engineered to target the Asian respiratory system. Releasing the coronavirus in Wuhan, a test city for 5G and a central transit hub, was key to our strategy. Then we tailored different strains that would target other ethnic groups in different countries. Unfortunately, the virus isn’t as effective as it was supposed to be. The Good Club had planned on it culling a much larger percentage of the world’s population. Since there weren’t widespread deaths, we’ve had to resort to inflating the numbers, enforcing practices to help kill more people at hospitals, and a massive disinformation campaign to promote fear. Soon we’ll be releasing another strain and will utilize the CDC and the WHO to make our vaccine cocktail mandatory in as many countries as possible, as well as forcing through mandates, like masks to lower people’s oxygen intake, causing illness and depression, and implementing vaccine passports as the first move toward an all-in-one digital ID is also key.

There is a Zen saying that states: everything is okay as it is. This realization can only be understood from the broadest viewpoint possible, as one would naturally look at the state of the world right in front of their eyes and not believe anything to be okay at all. We are all fragments of the Source that have chosen to have an experience outside of Source and play different roles in a theatrical play of sorts. Some will play heroes and some will play villains; without all the characters, there wouldn’t be a play to enjoy. No play lasts forever, as that would cease to be entertaining and become boring. When the play is over, the curtain will fall. When the curtain rises, all of the players will be holding hands and congratulating each other on their well-played characters. Then they will depart the stage and go backstage to reconnect with Source. However, some method actors get stuck in their characters after the play is over and need a cleansing Source bath to remember who they are. So seen from the highest possible big-picture scenario, everything is okay as it is.