The Great Quotes thread

[Bill Ryan]

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex: 1871)

[rgray222]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, wrote about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state laws barring biological men from women’s sports.

"Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are. Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic; it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex."

He went on to say in the same decision:

"To use language to obscure reality to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’— is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens ‘as equal[s].’"

[Raskolnikov]

"To sell chemotherapy as a 'therapy' is the biggest deceit in the history of medicine. Whoever masterminded this 'chemo-torture' deserves a monument in hell."

Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer

[Vicus]

There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

[Bill Ryan]

If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.

Mark Twain

[Raskolnikov]

"Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies."

Étienne de La Boétie

[grapevine]

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia."

- Richard Dawkins - "Unweaving the Rainbow"

[Raskolnikov]

"Suppose the information is released through a number of nationally distributed newspapers. The readers come across the respective false piece of information which has negative connotations. The harm is done whatever flat denial it would trigger on behalf of the accused party in the following days. First, it is very likely that the same reader would not read the ensuing denial, therefore keeping in mind the memory of the first reading. Although the content of the information is untrue, the reader's perception of the target of the article remains a negative one. Then, we must exploit as much as possible the vicious tendency of modern society represented by its sick thirst for sensational headlines exhibiting evil situations or characters.

We are well aware of both the influence and the terrible impact of such suggestions on the emotional nature of humans. We do know that evil suggestions destroy the harmonious energy structures of the aura and bring about a subtle form of stress at psychical level. We also know that they lower the frequency of positive perceptions and affect the beneficial intentions of humans. These perfectly serve our intentions as they exhaust people, diffuse their attention, weaken their alert mind and blur the farsightedness of their spirit."

Passage from Transylvanian Sunrise by Radu Cinamar and Peter Moon

[Bluegreen]

"Every woman a b-tch, every man a pig. Get used to it."

- Anonymous famous comedian

[Raskolnikov]

Debated between that last submission and this one from the same source. I understand most people have a serious aversion to tests, and being tested, but this was a very interesting take of the purpose of evil.

"If evil didn't exist, you couldn't realize the necessity of your return to the source; and you would endlessly wander through who knows what corners of the universe. This way though, evil's role in the creation of the universe has the main purpose of testing human beings. This is how the level of knowledge, spiritual evolution and capacity to love of every individual is tested. In connection with the choices one makes, it can be determined if one passed that life test or not."

Ibid.

[petra]

That’s a good one Raskolnikov. It reminds me of what Neitzche said;

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you”

[rgray222]

Some are born to enjoy illusion, others are cursed to see the truth
Friedrich Nietzsche

[Bill Ryan]

Empires always have the hubris to think they are indestructible, when in fact they are always unsustainable.

Marianne Williamson

[JackMcThorn]

'God, I want my fifties back,' 'I would do more. Your fifties are just - man, anything that's on your mind, go. Go attack it. Go attack it now.' - Brad Pitt

[Bill Ryan]

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A ship is worse than a jail. There is, in a jail, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger.

Samuel Johnson (1709—1784)

[rgray222]

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
Carl Jung

[Bill Ryan]

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Bill Ryan]

(I've shared this before, but I'm thinking these days that this idea is actually more and more exactly correct)

~~~

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.

Sir James Jeans, physicist, astronomer and mathematician, 1930

[rgray222]

"Our life is what our thoughts make it"
Marcus Aurelius

[Raskolnikov]

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces