β
Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
You are what what you eat eats.
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workingmen of all countries unite!
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women.
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β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
He showed the words βchocolate cakeβ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. βGuiltβ was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: βcelebration.
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not βif only.β Not βas long as.β I matter equally. Full stop.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Truth is treason in the empire of lies.
β
β
Ron Paul (The Revolution: A Manifesto)
β
I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
The loner who looks fabulous is one of the most vulnerable loners of all.
β
β
Anneli Rufus (Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto)
β
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl.
'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything.
Ever.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
A specter is haunting Europeβthe specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
People will selectively use βtraditionβ to justify anything.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Love is truly the great manifesto; the urge to be, to count for something, and, if death must come, to die valiantly, with acclamationβin short, to remain a memory.
β
β
Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
β
Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
β
β
Mary Beard (Women & Power: A Manifesto)
β
But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
This is the Manifesto of Little Monster
There is something heroic about the way my fans operate their cameras. So precisely, so intricately and so proudly. Like Kings writing the history of their people, is their prolific nature that both creates and procures what will later be percieved as the kingdom. So the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the Kings. They are the Queens. They write the hisory of the kingdom and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we percieve ourselves to be or rather to become, in the future.
When you are lonely,
I will be lonely too.
And this is the fame.
β
β
Lady Gaga
β
Because you are a girlβ is never a reason for anything. Ever.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Finch: Theodore Finch, in search of the Great Manifesto
Violet: I don't know that what means
Finch: It means 'the urge to be, to count for something, and, if death must come, to die valiantly, with acclamation - in short, to remain a memory.
β
β
Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
β
Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
I feel the color in my cheeks rising again. I must be the color of The Communist Manifesto.
β
β
E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, #1))
β
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Being interesting isn't important. But being happy is. As well as being a person you're proud of
β
β
Holly Bourne (The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting)
β
The Conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny. This is precisely why the Conservative reveres the Constitution and insists on adherence to it.
β
β
Mark R. Levin (Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto)
β
A Manifesto for Introverts
1. There's a word for 'people who are in their heads too much': thinkers.
2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.
3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths.
4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later.
5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters.
6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.
7. It's OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.
8. 'Quiet leadership' is not an oxymoron.
9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.
10. 'In a gentle way, you can shake the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi
β
β
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
β
I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way."
- Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918
β
β
Tristan Tzara
β
Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
β
β
AndrΓ© Breton (Manifestoes of Surrealism)
β
The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
If she likes makeup, let her wear it. If she likes fashion, let her dress up. But if she doesnβt like either, let her be. Donβt think that raising her feminist means forcing her to reject femininity. Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.
β
β
Tom Hodgkinson (The Freedom Manifesto)
β
When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Shake the hand that feeds you.
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn't understand.
β
β
Anneli Rufus (Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto)
β
We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
Because when push comes to shove, we really don't want to have sex with our friends... unless they're sexy. And sometimes we do want to have sex with our blackhearted, soul-sucking enemies... assuming they're sexy.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
This is your life. Do what you want and do it often.
If you don't like something, change it.
If you don't like your job, quit.
If you don't have enough time, stop watching TV.
If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.
Stop over-analysing, life is simple.
All emotions are beautiful.
When you eat, appreciate every last bite.
Life is simple.
Open your heart, mind and arms to new things and people, we are united in our differences.
Ask the next person you see what their passion is and share your inspiring dream with them.
Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself.
Some opportunities only come once, seize them.
Life is about the people you meet and the things you create with them, so go out and start creating.
Life is short, live your dream and wear your passion.
β
β
Holstee Manifesto (The Wedding Day)
β
Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedomβFree Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
β
β
Mary Beard (Women & Power: A Manifesto)
β
Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
If youβre concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication itβs not really food, and food is what you want to eat
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.
β
β
Valerie Solanas (SCUM Manifesto)
β
Let the revolution begin.
β
β
Ron Paul (The Revolution: A Manifesto)
β
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they'd find fulfilling if they were female.
β
β
Valerie Solanas (SCUM Manifesto)
β
For a start it doesnβt much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, itβs simply the fact that youβre saying it.
β
β
Mary Beard (Women & Power: A Manifesto)
β
The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.
β
β
Vine Deloria Jr. (Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto)
β
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Whenever I canβt sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend Iβve been assassinated. Iβve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine Iβm in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
So teach Chizalum that biology is an interesting and fascinating subject, but she should never accept it as justification for any social norm. Because social norms are created by human beings, and there is no social norm that cannot be changed.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
The Adβ₯rkable Manifesto
1. We have nothing to declare but our dorkiness.
2. Jumble sales are our shopping malls.
3. Better to make cookies than be a cookie-cutter.
4. Suffering doesnβt necessarily improve you but it does give you something to blog about.
5. Experiment with Photoshop, hair dye, nail polish and cupcake flavours but never drugs.
6. Donβt follow leaders, be one.
7. Necessity is the mother of customisation.
8. Puppies make everything better.
9. Quiet girls rarely make history.
10. Never shield your oddness, but wear your oddness like a shield.
β
β
Sarra Manning (Adorkable)
β
While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187
β
β
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
β
Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can't really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn't work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the word are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.
β
β
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
β
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
β
β
Valerie Solanas (SCUM Manifesto)
β
Why were we raised to speak in low tones about periods? To be filled with shame if our menstrual blood happened to stain our skirt? Periods are nothing to be ashamed of. Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist. I remember a man who said a period was like shit. Well, sacred shit, I told him, because you wouldnβt be here if periods didnβt happen.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
MANIFESTO OF THE BRAVE AND BROKENHEARTED There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers Than those of us who are willing to fall Because we have learned how to rise With skinned knees and bruised hearts; We choose owning our stories of struggle, Over hiding, over hustling, over pretending. When we deny our stories, they define us. When we run from struggle, we are never free. So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye. We will not be characters in our stories. Not villains, not victims, not even heroes. We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings. We craft love from heartbreak, Compassion from shame, Grace from disappointment, Courage from failure. Showing up is our power. Story is our way home. Truth is our song. We are the brave and brokenhearted. We are rising strong.
β
β
BrenΓ© Brown (Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.)
β
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world.
She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know β we cannot know β everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that.
Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people.
This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.
β
β
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
β
If you are a monster, stand up.
If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,
If youβve built a steam-powered wishing machine
If you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,
If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreams
Come stand by me.
If you have been broken, stand up.
If you have been broken, abandoned, alone
If you have been starving, a creature of bone
If you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throne
If you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,
Come stand by me.
If you are a savage, stand up.
If you are a witch, a dark queen, a black knight,
If you are a mummer, a pixie, a sprite,
If you are a pirate, a tomcat, a wright,
If you swear by the moon and you fight the hard fight,
Come stand by me.
If you are a devil, stand up.
If you are a villain, a madman, a beast,
If you are a strowler, a prowler, a priest,
If you are a dragon come sit at our feast,
For we all have stripes, and we all have horns,
We all have scales, tails, manes, claws and thorns
And here in the dark is where new worlds are born.
Come stand by me.
β
β
Catherynne M. Valente
β
Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they're not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more 'diabolical' in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn't complain. I don't make the fucking rules.
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Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
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Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement. We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
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Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the perspective of a convicted muderer in the song "Folsom Prison Blues,: Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are "probably drinkin' coffee." And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn't want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee. Within the mind of a killer, complex feeling are eerily simple. This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die, and the rest of us usually can't.
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Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
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What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline.
Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
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Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right)
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We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to be βniceβ to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the βfeelingsβ of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability. We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable. So
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
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So instead of teaching Chizalum to be likeable, teach her to be honest. And kind. And brave. Encourage her to speak her mind, to say what she really thinks, to speak truthfully. And then praise her when she does. Praise her especially when she takes a stand that is difficult or unpopular because it happens to be her honest position. Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that her kindness must never be taken for granted. Tell her that she, too, deserves the kindness of others. Teach her to stand up for what is hers. If another child takes her toy without her permission, ask her to take it back, because her consent is important. Tell her that if anything ever makes her uncomfortable, to speak up, to say it, to shout.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
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Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. Itβs an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.
This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures.
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Rob Bell (Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile)
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The tenth plank in Karl Marx's Manifesto for destroying our kind of civilization advocated the establishment of "free education for all children in public schools." There were several reasons why Marx wanted government to run the schools.β¦one of them [was that] βIt is capable of exact demonstration that if every party in the State has the right of excluding from public schools whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter in how small a minority the atheists or agnostics may be.β
It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and widespread instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.
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Ezra Taft Benson
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Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing because Journey's Steve Perry insists we should never do that.
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Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
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Where are you? And why did you go? I guess I'll never know this. Was it because I made you mad? Because I tried to help? Because I didn't answer when you threw rocks at my window? What if I had answered? What would you have said to me? Would I have been able to talk you into staying or talk you out of doing what you did? Or would that have happened anyway? Do you know my life is forever changed now? I used to think that was true because you came into it and, in doing that, forced me out of my room and into the world. Even when we weren't wandering, even from the floor of your closet, you showed the world to me. I didn't know that my life forever changing would be because you loved me and then left, in such a final way. So I guess there was no Great Manifesto after all, even though you made me believe there was. I guess there was only a school project. I'll never forgive you for leaving me. I just wish you could forgive me. You saved my life. And, finally, I simply write: Why couldn't I save yours?
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Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
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Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, 'You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there's simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we'll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.
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Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
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The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.
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Michel Onfray (Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam)
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People often come to me and ask me to pray for them, that they would discover Godβs will for their life. I already know Godβs will for their life β heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, cleanse lepers. They say, βYes, but I need to know if I should be a schoolteacher or a missionary.β I say, βWell, just pick one, and then heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, cleanse lepers.β Or they will say, βI just donβt know whether I should be married or should be single.β I reply, βWhat do you want to be?β βI really want to be married.β βThen get married... and heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, cleanse lepers.
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Bill Johnson (Manifesto for a Normal Christian Life)
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Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits considered generally male - sports cars, certain professional sports. In the same way, men's grooming is never suspect in the way women's grooming is - a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence, his ability, or his seriousness. A woman, on the other hand, is always aware of how a bright lipstick or a carefully-put-together outfit might very well make others assume her to be frivolous.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
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76. David Hume β Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau β On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile β or, On Education, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne β Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith β The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant β Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon β The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell β Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier β TraitΓ© ΓlΓ©mentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison β Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham β Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe β Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier β Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel β Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth β Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge β Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen β Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz β On War
93. Stendhal β The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron β Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer β Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday β Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell β Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte β The Positive Philosophy
99. HonorΓ© de Balzac β PΓ¨re Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson β Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne β The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville β Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill β A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin β The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens β Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard β Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau β Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx β Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot β Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville β Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky β Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert β Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen β Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy β War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain β The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James β The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James β The American; The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche β Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri PoincarΓ© β Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud β The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw β Plays and Prefaces
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Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
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I WANT her though, to take the same from me.
She touches me as if I were herself, her own.
She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that
I am the other,
she thinks we are all of one piece.
It is painfully untrue.
I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and
quick of my darkness
and perish on me, as I have perished on her.
Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have
each our separate being.
And that will be pure existence, real liberty.
Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved,
unextricated one from the other.
It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction
of being, that one is free,
not in mixing, merging, not in similarity.
When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest
sources, the darkest outgoings,
when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_"
she has no part in it, no part whatever,
it is the terrible _other_,
when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark-
ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete,
when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap
like one outside the house,
when she passes away as I have passed away
being pressed up against the _other_,
then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her,
I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver,
having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere,
one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique,
and she also, pure, isolated, complete,
two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction.
Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect.
VIII
AFTER that, there will only remain that all men
detach themselves and become unique,
that we are all detached, moving in freedom more
than the angels,
conditioned only by our own pure single being,
having no laws but the laws of our own being.
Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.
Every movement will be direct.
Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces
when we think of it
lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend.
Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing
singleness of mankind.
The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed,
the hen will nestle over her chickens,
we shall love, we shall hate,
but it will be like music, sheer utterance,
issuing straight out of the unknown,
the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us
unbidden, unchecked,
like ambassadors.
We shall not look before and after.
We shall _be_, _now_.
We shall know in full.
We, the mystic NOW.
(From the poem the Manifesto)
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D.H. Lawrence
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And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)