β
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.
β
β
Mahatma Gandhi
β
The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.
β
β
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
β
I don't want tea," said Clary, with muffled force. "I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them."
"Unfortunately," said Hodge, "we're all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it's either tea or nothing.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
β
Harry was left to ponder in silence the depths to which girls would sink to get revenge.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6))
β
I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge.
β
β
J.R.R. Tolkien
β
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
β
β
Confucius
β
Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.
β
β
Walter Scott (The Heart of Mid-Lothian)
β
Do not seek revenge and call it justice.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))
β
The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.
β
β
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
β
If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
I will hurt you for this. I don't know how yet, but give me time. A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you'll know the debt is paid.
β
β
George R.R. Martin (A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2))
β
My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!
β
β
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
β
I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3))
β
Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
Revenge proves its own executioner.
β
β
John Ford (Broken Heart (New Mermaid Series))
β
Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.
β
β
Mario Puzo (The Godfather (The Godfather, #1))
β
Grudges are for those who insist that they are owed something; forgiveness, however, is for those who are substantial enough to move on.
β
β
Criss Jami (SalomΓ©: In Every Inch In Every Mile)
β
It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing.
β
β
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3))
β
Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others-- it only changes yours.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder (300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late)
β
Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?
β
β
Mark Lawrence (Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire, #1))
β
Karma comes after everyone eventually. You can't get away with screwing people over your whole life, I don't care who you are. What goes around comes around. That's how it works. Sooner or later the universe will serve you the revenge that you deserve.
β
β
Jessica Brody (The Karma Club)
β
I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.
β
β
John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)
β
God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.
β
β
Walt Whitman
β
If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
β
β
William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)
β
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
β
β
George Bernard Shaw
β
To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.
β
β
Hermann Hesse
β
First, let no one rule your mind or body. Take special care that your thoughts remain unfettered... . Give men your ear, but not your heart. Show respect for those in power, but don't follow them blindly. Judge with logic and reason, but comment not. Consider none your superior whatever their rank or station in life. Treat all fairly, or they will seek revenge. Be careful with your money. Hold fast to your beliefs and others will listen.
β
β
Christopher Paolini (Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle, #1))
β
When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
β
β
Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)
β
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
β
β
Susan Sontag
β
People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.
β
β
NiccolΓ² Machiavelli
β
You should know I disagree with a lot of traditional advice. For instance, they say the best revenge is living well. I say itβs acid in the faceβwho will love them now?
β
β
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
β
The best revenge is living well without you.
β
β
Joyce Carol Oates
β
Revenge may be wicked, but itβs natural.
β
β
William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)
β
There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge.
β
β
Banksy
β
All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.
β
β
John Milton (Paradise Lost)
β
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
β
β
Heinrich Heine
β
Fool that I am," said he,"that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself".
β
β
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
β
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
β
β
Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)
β
He held up a book then. βI'm going to read it to you for relax.β
βDoes it have any sports in it?β
βFencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders... Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.β
βSounds okay,β I said and I kind of closed my eyes.
β
β
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
β
Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.
β
β
Euripides (Medea)
β
When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.
β
β
Mary Higgins Clark
β
The best revenge is massive success.
β
β
Frank Sinatra
β
Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure
β
β
Tacitus
β
Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.
β
β
Zora Neale Hurston
β
The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.
β
β
Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
β
Simply put, the best revenge is to live an awesome life.
β
β
Ramon Bautista (Bakit Hindi Ka Crush ng Crush Mo?)
β
No matter how many times people try to criticize you, the best revenge is to prove them wrong.
β
β
Zayn Malik
β
Before you enbark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
β
β
Sara Shepard (Perfect (Pretty Little Liars, #3))
β
It does little good to regret a choice. So often people say, βIf only I had known,β implying they wouldβve acted differently in a given situation. It is true that desires of the moment can blind oneβs sight of the future. Revenge is not as sweet as the adage claims. Yet who could pass a chance to taste it? And if the chance were allowed to slip by, would the fool regret his lack of action?Β
β
β
K. Ritz (Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master)
β
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
β
β
Neal Stephenson
β
I figured the Nightingale Investigations job application form had the question "Are you hot? Yes. No. If you answered no, please exit the building.
β
β
Kristen Ashley (Rock Chick Revenge (Rock Chick, #5))
β
To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it's an absolute duty.
β
β
Stieg Larsson
β
Beware the fury of a patient man.
β
β
John Dryden
β
I'm a fighter. I believe in the eye-for-an-eye business. I'm no cheek turner. I got no respect for a man who won't hit back. You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.
β
β
Muhammad Ali (The greatest: My own story)
β
What a waste of trees ... that adoption author is definitely a tree killer. ... I wish trees would sprout legs and come barging through the front doors and seek revenge for their obliterated brethren by ramming themselves down his goddamn throat.
β
β
Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
β
The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.
β
β
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption)
β
But men often mistake killing and revenge for justice. They seldom have the stomach for justice.
β
β
Robert Jordan
β
I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.
β
β
William Shakespeare
β
...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
β
β
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
β
It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche
β
I don't want revenge on the Taliban, I want education for sons and daughters of the Taliban.
β
β
Malala Yousafzai
β
There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear..." he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge.
β
β
Ally Carter (Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (Gallagher Girls, #3))
β
Insecure people only eclipse your sun because theyβre jealous of your daylight and tired of their dark, starless nights.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
Success is the best revenge for anything.
β
β
Ed Sheeran
β
You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.
β
β
Grace Willows (To Kiss a King)
β
An eye for an eye, and the whole world would be blind.
β
β
Kahlil Gibran
β
I don't like it, but my hands are tied. I just want you to know this: if I ever get the chance to betray you, I will. If the opportunity arises to pay you back, I'll take it. You'll never be able to trust me.
β
β
Darren Shan (Cirque du Freak: A Living Nightmare (Cirque du Freak, #1))
β
I didnβt love you to seek revenge.
I didnβt love you out of loneliness or unhappiness.
I didnβt love you for any of the misguided reasons that time might convince you I did.
I just loved you because youβre you.
β
β
Ranata Suzuki
β
He isn't my man."
"Girl, it don't matter you don't think he is, he thinks he is. Therefore in Badass Motherfucker Land, that means he is.
β
β
Kristen Ashley (Rock Chick Revenge (Rock Chick, #5))
β
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.
β
β
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
β
No. He was not here to wreak revenge.
For revenge was trifling and hollow.
No. He was not here to retrieve his wife.
For his wife was not a thing to be retrieved.
No. He was not here to negotiate a truce.
For a truce suggested he wished to compromise.
He was here to burn something to the ground.
β
β
RenΓ©e Ahdieh (The Rose & the Dagger (The Wrath and the Dawn, #2))
β
she thinks I'm psycho cause I like to rhyme her name with things.
β
β
Taylor Swift
β
Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.
β
β
Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You)
β
There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.
β
β
Kate DiCamillo (The Tale of Despereaux)
β
Humm humm haaa. Rahmumm humm haaaa," intoned Opal, finishing her chant. "Peace be inside me, tolerance all around me, forgiveness in my path. Now, Mervall, show me where the filthy human is so that I may feed him his organs.
β
β
Eoin Colfer (The Time Paradox (Artemis Fowl, #6))
β
I wanted to thank you for saving my life. I am still puzzled about your motivesβ¨though. Was it revenge against Zedan for rejecting you?ββ¨βYou insult me. It seems that you think of everybody in the same lowly terms youβ¨think of yourself. If there is anybody I should hate for Zedan rejecting me, it should beβ¨you. He was only doing what is expected of him in our society.ββ¨βYou mean you don't hate me?β This was a new revelation to Brown. It worried him.β¨He was used to hate, he could deal with it, but this he could not understand, he had usedβ¨the girl ruthlessly and yet she did not hate him.
β
β
Max Nowaz (The Arbitrator)
β
When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.
β
β
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses)
β
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
β
β
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
β
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.
β
β
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
β
The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins β but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.
β
β
Matthew Woodring Stover (Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (Star Wars Novelizations, #3))
β
Mind my words, Cheshire, I will have you banished from this kingdom if you tempt me."
"An empty threat from an empty girl."
She rounded on him, teeth flashing. "I am not empty. I am full to the brim with murder and revenge. I am overflowing and I do not think you wish for me to overflow on to you."
"There was a time" β Cheshire yawned β "when you overflowed with whimsy and icing sugar. I liked that Catherine better.
β
β
Marissa Meyer (Heartless)
β
Sorry.
Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It's the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It's theirs to take or leave.
Sorry means you leave yourself open, to embrace or to ridicule or to revenge. Sorry is a question that begs forgiveness, because the metronome of a good heart won't settle until things are set right and true. Sorry doesn't take things back, but it pushes things forward. It bridges the gap. Sorry is a sacrament. It's an offering. A gift.
β
β
Craig Silvey (Jasper Jones)
β
Accomplishments donβt erase shame, hatred, cruelty, silence, ignorance, discrimination, low self-esteem or immorality. It covers it up, with a creative version of pride and ego. Only restitution, forgiving yourself and others, compassion, repentance and living with dignity will ever erase the past.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
LET THE FLAMES BEGIN!
β
β
Hayley Williams
β
It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough.
β
β
Joe Abercrombie (Last Argument of Kings (The First Law, #3))
β
Yes. What is it, guilt, revenge, love, what?β
I swallowed. βI live alone.β
"And your point is?β
"You have the Pack. Youβre surrounded by people who would fall over themselves for the pleasure of your company. I have no one. My parents are dead, my entire family is gone. I have no friends. Except Jim, and thatβs more of a working relationship than anything else. I have no lover. I canβt even have a pet, because Iβm not at the house often enough to keep it from starving. When I come crawling home, bleeding and filthy and exhausted, the house is dark and empty. Nobody keeps the porch light on for me. Nobody hugs me and says, βHey, Iβm glad you made it. Iβm glad youβre okay. I was worried.β Nobody cares if I live or die. Nobody makes me coffee, nobody holds me before I go to bed, nobody fixes my medicine when Iβm sick. Iβm by myself.
β
β
Ilona Andrews (Magic Burns (Kate Daniels, #2))
β
down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honorβby instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
βHe will take no manβs money dishonestly and no manβs insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
βThe story is this manβs adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
β
β
Raymond Chandler
β
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
β
β
Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6; Witches, #2))
β
It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
β
β
Seamus Heaney (Beowulf)
β
I like women who havenβt lived with too many men.
I donβt expect virginity but I simply prefer women
who havenβt been rubbed raw by experience.
There is a quality about women who choose
men sparingly;
it appears in their walk
in their eyes
in their laughter and in their
gentle hearts.
Women who have had too many men
seem to choose the next one
out of revenge rather than with
feeling.
When you play the field selfishly everything
works against you:
one canβt insist on love or
demand affection.
Youβre finally left with whatever
you have been willing to give
which often is:
nothing.
β
β
Charles Bukowski
β
Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell
leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house heβs never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. donβt wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
donβt lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.
β
β
Marty McConnell
β
The phone at my ass started ringing, I leaned forward and pulled it out.
βDonβt answer that,β Noah ordered.
βFuck you,β I shot back, saw the display said βLuke callingβ and flipped it open.
βYo.β
βBabe,β Luke replied.
βIβve been kidnapped again,β I informed him.
βI know. Iβm following.
β
β
Kristen Ashley (Rock Chick Revenge (Rock Chick, #5))
β
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
β
β
Seamus Heaney
β
Forget what hurt you in the past, but never forget what it taught you. However, if it taught you to hold onto grudges, seek revenge, not forgive or show compassion, to categorize people as good or bad, to distrust and be guarded with your feelings then you didnβt learn a thing. God doesnβt bring you lessons to close your heart. He brings you lessons to open it, by developing compassion, learning to listen, seeking to understand instead of speculating, practicing empathy and developing conflict resolution through communication. If he brought you perfect people, how would you ever learn to spiritually evolve?
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done itβit, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
β
β
James Baldwin (Giovanniβs Room)
β
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of youβthe secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworthβs expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These thingsβthe beauty, the memory of our own pastβare good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)
β
The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo KiΕ‘ put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.' A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it wellβand wishing that it would do better.
β
β
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
β
Dear Child,
Sometimes on your travel through hell, you meet people that think they are in heaven because of their cleverness and ability to get away with things. Travel past them because they don't understand who they have become and never will. These type of people feel justified in revenge and will never learn mercy or forgiveness because they live by comparison. They are the people that don't care about anyone, other than who is making them feel confident. They donβt understand that their deity is not rejoicing with them because of their actions, rather he is trying to free them from their insecurities, by softening their heart. They rather put out your light than find their own. They don't have the ability to see beyond the false sense of happiness they get from destroying others. You know what happiness is and it isnβt this. Donβt see their success as their deliverance. It is a mask of vindication which has no audience, other than their own kind. They have joined countless others that call themselves βsurvivorsβ. They believe that they are entitled to win because life didnβt go as planned for them. You are not like them. You were not meant to stay in hell and follow their belief system. You were bound for greatness. You were born to help them by leading. Rise up and be the light home. You were given the gift to see the truth. They will have an army of people that are like them and you are going to feel alone. However, your family in heaven stands beside you now. They are your strength and as countless as the stars. It is time to let go!
Love,
Your Guardian Angel
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Shannon L. Alder
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You think I donβt know pain?β Puck shook his head at me. βOr loss? Iβve been around a lot longer than you, prince! I know what love is, and Iβve lost
my fair share, too. Just because we have a different way of handling it, doesnβt mean I donβt have scars of my own.β
βName one,β I scoffed. βGive me one instance where you havenβtββ
βMeghan Chase!β Puck roared, startling me into silence. I blinked, and he sneered at me. βYeah, your highness. I know what loss is. Iβve loved that
girl since before she knew me. But I waited. I waited because I didnβt want to lie about who I was. I wanted her to know the truth before anything else.
So I waited, and I did my job. For years, I protected her, biding my time, until the day she went into the Nevernever after her brother. And then you
came along. And I saw how she looked at you. And for the first time, I wanted to kill you as much as you wanted to kill me.
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Julie Kagawa
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...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.
But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
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Charles Darwin (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809β82)