Rat Race Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Rat Race. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
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Lily Tomlin
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If money’s the god people worship, I’d rather go worship the devil instead.
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Jess C. Scott (Rockstar)
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All those ants scurrying about like rats in a maze, going back and forth to the same few locations day after day, thinking the cheese they’re sniffing for will somehow magically appear on the routes they cover over and over again. They’re born into the programmed maze, so they can’t even conceive of a different way of life. Not only can’t they believe in a different way of life, but they’re programmed to scoff and ridicule the few freethinkers who do. After the ridiculing, they go back to their programming, pushing buttons and pulling levers for no reason. Ah, the good old rat race that never ends till cancer comes a knockin’.
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
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The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" β€” the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
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David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
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Be like a duck, paddling and working very hard inside the water, but what everyone sees is a smiling and calm face.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.
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Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1))
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Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.
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Abbie Hoffman (Steal This Book)
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Coming out of your comfort zone is tough in the beginning, chaotic in the middle, and awesome in the end...because in the end, it shows you a whole new world !! Make an attempt..
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage.
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Ed Brubaker
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If you join the rat race β€” you're in the race of rats.
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Bertolt Brecht
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Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures!
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Jeff Smith (Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race (Bone, #2))
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I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not.
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Jean Webster
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The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. β€” Lily Tomlin
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Amy McMillen (Reclaiming Control: Looking Inward to Recalibrate Your Life)
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Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
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Anna Quindlen (A Short Guide to a Happy Life)
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Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.
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R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
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One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.
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Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3))
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Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
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R.D. Laing
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Comfort is your biggest trap and coming out of comfort zone your biggest challenge.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
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David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
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Rat race is the perfect name for it,' she said. 'We're always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn't want anything else and then started looking for something else to want? It seems like we're always searching for something to satisfy is, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we would.
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S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)
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I don’t run for trains.” Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race.
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Aman Jassal (Rainbow - the shades of love)
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I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!
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John Cleese
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To achieve what 1% of the worlds population has (Financial Freedom), you must be willing to do what only 1% dare to do..hard work and perseverance of highest order.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Jesus doesn’t participate in the rat race. He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwellingβ€”all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. Words used to describe us being with Him.
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Lysa TerKeurst (Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely)
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Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the β€œrat race” β€” the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
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David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
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I am running and running, God knows where; God knows why?' 'Aren’t we all?
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Abhaidev (The Gods Are Not Dead)
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In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
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Do not focus on money, instead focus on a problem that needs to be solved for the world..money will follow you as a bi-product.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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You don't have to be like most people around you, because most people never become truly rich and wealthy.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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I recommend to young people to seek work for what they will learn, more than what they will earn. Look down the road at what skills they want to acquire before choosing a specific profession and before getting trapped in the Rat Race.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad)
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Ideas do not work.. It is YOU who has to do the work....
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.
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Hunter S. Thompson
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Another reptilian brain disguised as a modest mouse in the rat race.
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Alejandro Saint-BarthΓ©lemy ($O$)
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Depressionβ€”which often culminates in burnoutβ€”follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears itself out in a rat race it runs against itself.
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Byung-Chul Han (MΓΌdigkeitsgesellschaft)
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There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race' - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
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David Foster Wallace
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I am running and running, God knows where; God knows why?
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Abhaidev (The Gods Are Not Dead)
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I will not join the rat race because I'm not a rat. And I will not blindly follow a specific faith because I'm not a bat. The only race I'll take part in is for humans being humane. It's called the human race, and sadly it's got the least participants.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Got an idea to start", "Thinking to start" and "Making a commitment to start" is one aspect of life. Actually "Starting" what you truly want to do in life, is a completely different ball game.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made. For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind organism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to stop the unsavory changes, the rat race, the death unwish - the winged chariot, the horns and the motors, the Devil in the clock. Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods, but a rather pedestrian pair of muddled suburbanites who, no matter how bumbling they tried, never could quite understand how or why you grew up to your 21st birthday.
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Sylvia Plath
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Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything elseβ€”Satan has us just where he wants us.
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Hugh Nibley (Approaching Zion (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 09))
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Just when you start to get ahead in the rat race, the universe delivers bigger rats.
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Dennis E. Taylor (For We Are Many (Bobiverse, #2))
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Comfortably living below what you can afford, without much desire for more, removes a tremendous amount of social pressure that many people in the modern first world subject themselves to. Nassim Taleb explained: β€œTrue success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.
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Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
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Life is not a list of checkboxes that we have to tick off sequentially one after another. Got a degree? Tick. Booked a house under my name? Tick. Got married? Tick. Had Children? Tick. All this sound too clichΓ©, too depressing. These are acts which people do under the influence of peer pressure, mimicking each other, and not willingly as a genuine choice of their own.
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Abhaidev (That Thing About You)
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To read is to see things from someone else's perspective, and that naturally leads you to stop and look out for other people, rather than chase after success in the rat race. If more people read, I think the world would become a better place.
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Hwang Bo-Reum (Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop)
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[Poem: Slates of Grey] Sullen faces like slates of greyβ€” What I’d seen on a walk today. Bodies rushing bodies bolting Time for life a disregarding. Money to make and to grow old What about the hands to hold? Deadlines, projects, people to meet What about our own two feet. Sullen faces like slates of grey... What I’d see most anyday.
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Jess C. Scott (Trouble)
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It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.
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Richard Koch (The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less)
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A brilliant idea is like a baby in a mothers womb. You need to bring it out in the world, nurture it, feed it, grow it, till it becomes big enough to take care of itself. If you leave it at the stage of an idea itself, it is as good as non existent.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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While one who sings with his tongue on fire Gargles in the rat race choir Bent out of shape from society's pliers Cares not to come up any higher But rather get you down in the hole That he's in.
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Bob Dylan
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You can make EXCUSES and earn SYMPATHY, OR You can make MONEY and earn ADMIRATION. The choice is always yours...
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Clarity equals victory. Look at successful people. Do you really think they have seven effective habits? Fuck no. Who’s got time for that? They have one effective habit: DOING. When you are a β€˜doer’ you lap the rest of the rats in the race.
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Shane Kuhn (The Intern's Handbook (John Lago Thriller, #1))
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Rich people have small TVs, small cars, but big libraries.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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I talk about freedom from the Rat Race, and they focus on toilets. That is the thought pattern that keeps most people poor. They criticize instead of analyze.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad)
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Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans. Join the Rat Race "just for a while." Concentrate on your career "just for a while." Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while." Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while." Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
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Christopher Brookmyre (A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away)
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You can win the rat race but you're still a rat. The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers.
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Banksy (Wall and Piece)
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Look at everything upside down.Take absolutely nothing for granted.
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Dick Francis (Rat Race)
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Your assets are your employees. Invest more on those performing well. Let the non performers go.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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You do pay a price for your Financial Freedom, but it is far lesser than what you pay for a Lifetime Slavery.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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All of us, at some point in life, get brilliant ideas...only a few of us have the courage to take the next step.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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I read everyday, because reading takes me away, away to a place where nothing is impossible.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
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H.L. Mencken (A Mencken Chrestomathy)
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Most people have a price. And they have a price because of human emotions named fear and greed. First, the fear of being without money motivates us to work hard, and then once we get that paycheck, greed or desire starts us thinking about all the wonderful things money can buy. A pattern is then set: get up, go to work, pay bills, get up, go to work, pay bills... Their lives are then run forever by two emotions, fear and greed. Offer them more money, and they continue the cycle by also increasing their spending. This is what I call the Rat Race.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad)
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Children need time to become themselves--through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff--with choices and pseudochoices--before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: More!
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Kim John Payne (Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids)
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The key is remembering that anything you buy and don’t use, anything you throw away, anything you consume and don’t enjoy is money down the drain, wasting your life energy and wasting the finite resources of the planet. Any waste of your life energy means more hours lost to the rat race, making a dying. Frugality is the user-friendly and earth-friendly lifestyle.
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Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life)
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If we keep him for ourselves, we can do anything we want with him!' 'OH, REALLY?! Does that include baking him in a quiche?!' 'NO, IT DOES NOT INCLUDE THAT! IT INCLUDES EATING HIM RAW!' 'That's too bad. He would've made a fine pastry filling.
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Jeff Smith (Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race (Bone, #2))
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For a dreamer, pain and pleasure are synonyms.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Some people that are in charge are usually less intelligent than the people who work under them. The reason why those people are in charge and you aren’t is because you have a conscience.
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Heather Chapple (Write like no one is reading)
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Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary.
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Peter Watts (Blindsight (Firefall, #1))
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You can always alter and adapt your plan, provided you have one.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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<..> Reading makes you see with clearer eyes and understand the world better. When you do that , you become stronger - the feeling you associate with success. But at the same time with pain. Within the pages, there's much suffering, beyond that we've gone through in our finite experience of life. You'll read about suffering you didn't know existed. Having experienced their pain through words, it becomes a lot harder to focus on pursuing individual happiness and success. Reading makes you deviate further from the textbook definition of success because books don't make us go ahead of or above anyone else; they guide us to stand alongside others. <...> <..> We become more compassionate. To read is to see things from someone else's perspective, and that naturally leads you to stop and look out for other people, rather than chase after success in the rat race. If more people read, I think the world would become a better place.
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Hwang Bo-Reum (Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop)
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For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.
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Alan W. Watts
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What is more important - Pretending to live OR living your life? Forget about what others think about you and your way of living. Live your life the way you like it.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Money has the power to buy you things. But a much bigger power of money is in generating more money for you. Those who are able to manifest the latter, are never short of it.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Life Insurance is a mitigation to the risk of your life Financial Freedom is a mitigation to the risk of living your life !! Choice has always been yours.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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You will either find a way, or an excuse. It depends on how badly you want it in life.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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No knowledge comes to you late. It comes just at the time when you are ready for it.
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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I have employed someone who earns money for me and does not charge anything .. i call it my corpus or nest egg. It is a beautiful feeling when your corpus earns money and beats your salary
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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People have power over you because you're trying to prove yourself to them. Make tea and sip. Cook food and eat. Have a nice bath and sound sleep. You are not here to prove anything to anyone. You are the child of the universe .
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Shunya
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Time, not money, is your biggest asset in life. You need time to invest in relationships (with yourself and your family) or to chase your passion. "Think again" if you are still trading off time for money. Let your money work for you. You don't work for money. That is exactly what Financial Freedom is...
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Manoj Arora (From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom)
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Had I joined the company that very first night, fooling myself that I was seeking some purpose, but in reality only following Frederick? How different was I really, from those Office Worker Mohitos, those Rat Race Daquiris, seeking only to partner off and settle down?
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Katie Hall-May (Puck's Legacy)
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The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is really freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing
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David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
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It requires more toughness to resist the world than to join in the rat-race
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Sir James Darling
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Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.
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Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
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In emphasizing achievements (which are tangible) over the cultivation of a love of learning (which is intangible), schools simultaneously reinforce the rat-race mentality and stifle children's emotional development.
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Tal Ben-Shahar (Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment)
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But I knew I wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with me, too, and also knew what he wanted to do with his life. So, we compromised. He took the job in Des Moines, and it was my responsibility to get a job that would make enough money for what we needed, and that I enjoyed enough. I didn’t have to love it, but it didn’t matter whether I did, either, because I had him. I kept trying new things, too, and eventually discovered pottery. It’s fun, of course, but the most important part is that I didn’t feel like my job had to be my everything.” This is what I have to keep reminding myself. Sometimes a job can just be a job. We aren’t all going to win the rat race. β€œI know.
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Christina Lauren (Roomies)
β€œ
Why was he doing this? So that life could continue in the metro? Right. So that they could grow mushrooms and pigs at VDNKh in the future, and so that his stepfather and Zhenkina’s family lived there in peace, so that people unknown to him could settle at Alekseevskaya and at Rizhskaya, and so that the uneasy bustle of trade at Byelorusskaya didn’t die away. So that the Brahmins could stroll about Polis in their robes and rustle the pages of books, grasping the ancient knowledge and passing it on to subsequent generations. So that the fascists could build their Reich, capturing racial enemies and torturing them to death, and so that the Worm people could spirit away strangers’ children and eat adults, and so that the woman at Mayakovskaya could bargain with her young son in the future, earning herself and him some bread. So that the rat races at Paveletskaya didn’t end, and the fighters of the revolutionary brigade could continue their assaults on fascists and their funny dialectical arguments. And so that thousands of people throughout the whole metro could breathe, eat, love one another, give life to their children, defecate and sleep, dream, fight, kill, be ravished and betrayed, philosophize and hate, and so that each could believe in his own paradise and his own hell . . . So that life in the metro, senseless and useless, exalted and filled with light, dirty and seething, endlessly diverse, so miraculous and fine could continue.
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Dmitry Glukhovsky (Metro 2033)
β€œ
Here are the sounds of Wear. It rattles stone on stone. It sucks its teeth. It sings. It hisses like the rain. It roars. It laughs. It claps its hands. Sometimes I think it prays. In winter, through the ice, I've seen it moving swift and black as Tune, without a sound. Here are the sights of Wear. It falls in braids. It parts at rocks and tumbles round them white as down or flashes over them in silver quilts. It tosses fallen trees like bits of straw yet spins a single leaf as gentle as a maid. Sometimes it coils for rest in darkling pools and sometimes it leaps its banks and shatters in the air. In autumn, I've seen it breathe a mist so thick and grey you'd never know old Wear was there at all. Each day, for years and years, I've gone and sat in it. Usually at dusk I clamber down and slowly sink myself to where it laps against my breast. Is it too much to say, in winter, that I die? Something of me dies at least. First there's the fiery sting of cold that almost stops my breath, the aching torment in my limbs. I think I may go mad, my wits so outraged that they seek to flee my skull like rats a ship that's going down. I puff. I gasp. Then inch by inch a blessed numbness comes. I have no legs, no arms. My very heart grows still. These floating hands are not my hands. The ancient flesh I wear is rags for all I feel of it. "Praise, Praise!" I croak. Praise God for all that's holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death. In the little church I built of wood for Mary, I hollowed out a place for him. Perkin brings him by the pail and pours him in. Now that I can hardly walk, I crawl to meet him there. He takes me in his chilly lap to wash me of my sins. Or I kneel down beside him till within his depths I see a star. Sometimes this star is still. Sometimes she dances. She is Mary's star. Within that little pool of Wear she winks at me. I wink at her. The secret that we share I cannot tell in full. But this much I will tell. What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.
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Frederick Buechner (Godric)
β€œ
I'm hungry.' 'Me too.' 'Will you get us something to eat?' 'I suppose I could take a look around. Maybe find a baby bird or a dead squirrel, or something. One word about a quiche, and I'll kill you.' 'While you're up there, try to find some nice, soft grasses we can sit on and be more comfortable.' 'Yes, comrade. ... Here. I found some eggs to suck on.' 'Did you remember to get the grasses?' 'No. I forgot.' 'Are you going to get the grasses?' 'Can I eat first?' 'I don't know why you say you'll do things if you don't mean it.' 'I MEANT it! I just FORGOT!' 'You can get the grasses after you finish eating.' 'Thank you.' 'And try to find some water. We're going to need water if we plan on hiding out here.' 'YES COMRADE! ANYTHING ELSE?' ... 'Y'know, we could've had these eggs in a quiche!
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Jeff Smith (Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race (Bone, #2))
β€œ
That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat....When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
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H.P. Lovecraft (Tales of H.P. Lovecraft)
β€œ
The earth. Smog, murder, the poisoned air, the poisoned water, the poisoned food, the hatred, the hopelessness, everything. The only beautiful thing about the earth is the animals and now they are being killed off, soon they will be gone except for pet rats and race horses. It’s so sad, no wonder you drink so much.
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Charles Bukowski (Pulp)
β€œ
The mean boys huddled nearby, looking over, hoping my mom wouldn’t rat them out to their moms. Mom called to them, β€œThat’s really original, I wish I’d thought of that.” I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn’t fall, because Mom was in the world.
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Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
β€œ
Read History: thus learn how small a space You may inhabit, nor inhabit long In crowding Cosmos -- in that confined place Work boldly; build your flimsy barriers strong; Turn round and round, make warm your nest; among The other hunting beasts, keep heart and face, -- Not to betray the doomed and splendid race You are so proud of, to which you belong. For trouble comes to all of us: the rat Has courage, in adversity, to fight; But what a shining animal is man, Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that, For worse than that must follow -- yet can write Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay (Mine the Harvest)
β€œ
Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their marks Made everything from toy guns that sparks To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much Is really sacred. While preachers preach of evil fates Teachers teach that knowledge waits Can lead to hundred-dollar plates Goodness hides behind its gates But even the President of the United States Sometimes must have To stand naked. An' though the rules of the road have been lodged It's only people's games that you got to dodge And it's alright, Ma, I can make it. Advertising signs that con you Into thinking you're the one That can do what's never been done That can win what's never been won Meantime life outside goes on All around you. Although the masters make the rules For the wise men and the fools I got nothing, Ma, to live up to. For them that must obey authority That they do not respect in any degree Who despite their jobs, their destinies Speak jealously of them that are free Cultivate their flowers to be Nothing more than something They invest in. While some on principles baptized To strict party platforms ties Social clubs in drag disguise Outsiders they can freely criticize Tell nothing except who to idolize And then say God Bless him. While one who sings with his tongue on fire Gargles in the rat race choir Bent out of shape from society's pliers Cares not to come up any higher But rather get you down in the hole That he's in. Old lady judges, watch people in pairs Limited in sex, they dare To push fake morals, insult and stare While money doesn't talk, it swears Obscenity, who really cares Propaganda, all is phony. While them that defend what they cannot see With a killer's pride, security It blows the minds most bitterly For them that think death's honesty Won't fall upon them naturally Life sometimes Must get lonely. And if my thought-dreams could been seen They'd probably put my head in a guillotine But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.
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Bob Dylan
β€œ
Prayer before Birth I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me. I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me. I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me. I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me. I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me. I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me. I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me. Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.
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Louis MacNeice
β€œ
These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition for work in the world and the service of God, is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. Also it is a real goal, with objective problems that a man can work at personally, and take responsibility for, and make decisions aboutβ€”unlike the interpersonal relations of the corporation, or the routine of the factory job for which the worker couldn't care less. But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal: he has the wife, the small kids, the suburban home, and the labor-saving domestic devices. How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. Perhaps the truth is, if marriage and children are the goal, a man cannot really achieve it. It is not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not justified in his work and independent in the world. Correspondingly, his wife feels justified in the small children, but does she have a man, do the children have a father, if he is running a Rat Race? Into what world do the small children grow up in such a home?
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Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System)
β€œ
PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me. I am not yet born; console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me. I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me. I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me. I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me. I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me. I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me. Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.
”
”
Louis Macniece (OraciΓ³n antes de nacer (Poesia / Poetry) (Spanish and English Edition))
β€œ
What do think about abortion?” β€œI could feel the tension growing in the plane. I dropped my head, acknowledging that we had very different value systems for our lives. Then I thought of a way to respond to his question. β€œYou’re Jewish, right?” I asked. β€œYes,” he said defensively. β€œI told you I was!” β€œDo you know how Hitler persuaded the German people to destroy more than six million of your Jewish ancestors?” The man looked at me expectantly, so I continued. ”He convinced them that Jews were not human and then exterminated your people like rats.” I could see that I had his attention, so I went on. β€œDo you understand how Americans enslaved, tortured, and killed millions of Africans? We dehumanized them so our constitution didn’t apply to them, and then we treated them worse than animals.” β€œHow about the Native Americans?” I pressed. β€œDo you have any idea how we managed to hunt Indians like wild animals, drive them out of their own land, burn their villages, rape their women, and slaughter their children? Do you have any clue how everyday people turned into cruel murderers?” My Jewish friend was silent, and his eyes were filling with tears as I made my point. β€œWe made people believe that the Native Americans were wild savages, not real human beings, and then we brutalized them without any conviction of wrongdoing! Now do you understand how we have persuaded mothers to kill their own babies? We took the word fetus, which is the Latin word for β€˜offspring,’ and redefined it to dehumanize the unborn. We told mothers, β€˜That is not really a baby you are carrying in your belly; it is a fetus, tissue that suddenly forms into a human being just seconds before it exits the womb.’ In doing so, we were able to assert that, in the issue of abortion, there is only one person’s human rights to consider, and then we convinced mothers that disposing of fetal tissue (terminating the life of their babies) was a woman’s right. Our constitution no longer protects the unborn because they are not real people. They are just lifeless blobs of tissue.” By now, tears were flowing down his cheeks. I looked right into his eyes and said, β€œYour people, the Native Americans, and the African Americans should be the greatest defenders of the unborn on the planet. After all, you know what it’s like for society to redefine you so that they can destroy your races. But ironically, your races have the highest abortion rates in this country! Somebody is still trying to exterminate your people, and you don’t even realize it. The names have changed, but the plot remains the same!” Finally he couldn’t handle it anymore. He blurted out, β€œI have never heard anything like this before. I am hanging out with the wrong people. I have been deceived!
”
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Kris Vallotton
β€œ
The pineal gland is activated by light and controls the body's bio- rhythms in concert with the hypothalamus gland which regulates hunger, thirst, sexual desire and the biological clock that dictates how fast we age. Look at the potential for mass control if you can externally suppress and manipulate the pineal and hypothalamus glands alone. You can make it much harder to perceive beyond the five senses, decide how quickly people age, how much they want sex, when they are hungry and thirsty and for how long. This is the key reason for putting sodium fluoride into water supplies and toothpaste. The pineal gland absorbs more fluoride than any other part of the body and becomes calcified by this highly-damaging toxin. Sodium fluoride is an appalling waste product of the aluminum industry and has been used in rat poison. It causes cancer, genetic damage, Alzheimer's disease, disrupts the endocrine system and dumbs down the brain. It was added to drinking water in the Nazi concentration camps to make the inmates more acquiescent and docile.
”
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David Icke (Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More)